Modern science developed historically as an outgrowth of Christian theological frameworks.
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SUPPORTED
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Historical and academic literature supports the view that modern science developed within and was fostered by Western Christian intellectual frameworks and societies.
It is no accident that the birth and growth of the modern sciences took place in tandem with the birth and growth of modern biblical criticism within the context of (largely European and North American) Christian societies from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Both kinds of enterprise – science and biblical criticism – were made possible by (and contributed to) the changes in attitude towards religious authority and Christian theological tradition that flowed from the European Reformations and Enlightenment into what we characterize today as modernity. Each enterprise has developed its own specialized and distinctive methods for ‘reading’ its core subject matter (whether the natural world or ancient scriptural texts), but it is common to find these methods conflated when it comes to biblical texts which tell of the natural world. For instance, the creation story of Genesis 1 is frequently read at a popular level in light of Big Bang theory (and vice versa), while many creationists rely upon the Genesis texts to inform their own ‘creation science’, thus diverging from mainstream scientific views on the age of the earth and the status of evolution. Critical biblical scholars, for their part, have resisted naïve identifications between biblical narratives and scientific theories, pointing out that ancient texts require sensitive and historically-minded handling. This article explores ways in which the core biblical texts of creation and miracle have been understood and
The scientific enterprise, in common with other studies, cannot be pursued without making certain presuppositions which themselves cannot be derived from science. I shall argue that biblically based Judeo-Christian beliefe are congruent with diese presuppositions. Historically, such beliefe have provided fertile soil within which Western science has developed and flourished from the seventeenth century onwards (Brooke, 1991; Hooykaas, 1972; Russell, 1985). This favourable environment can be seen as springing from characteristics of the world that might be expected from Judeo-Christian beliefe about the nature of God and the nature of humankind as created ‘in God’s image’. However, now mat modern science has become a mature cluster of disciplines, a diametrically opposite belief has become associated with it in popular thought. It is a belief that turns its back on the origins of Western science within theism and presents science as atheistic. This volte-face has been accompanied by various unsuccessful attempts to derive ultimate answers to the meaning of life from science itself. But the failure of science to answer questions about the purpose of life, or how we ought to behave, has brought to science its detractors. However, rather than bemoaning science’s failure to deliver something which was never in its gift, it could be appropriate to look again for answers to these kinds of questions, to the Judeo-Christian worldview within which science developed and found a prominen
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