Same Sex Science

It is often asserted that modern science had it’s roots in Christian culture and could in fact only have gotten started given such a milieu.

…the flowering of modern science depended upon the Judeo-Christian worldview of the existence of a real physical contingent universe, created and held in being by an omnipotent personal God, with man having the capabilities of rationality and creativity, and thus being capable of investigating it.

The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy

An award-winning philosopher uncovers the Christian foundations of modern science. Renowned historian and philosopher of science Stanley Jaki boldly illumines one of the best-kept secrets of science history — the vital role theology has historically played in fruitful scientific development.

Beginning with an overview of failed attempts at a sustained science by the ancient cultures of Greece, China, India, and the early Muslim empire, Jaki shows that belief in Christ — a belief absent in all these cultures — secured for science its only viable birth starting in the High Middle Ages.

The Savior of Science

In Pearcey’s latest book Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes she goes beyond these perhaps less controversial claims.

“Only a biblical worldview provides an adequate epistemology for science.” (p. 197)

“To do science, even the most hard-boiled atheist must function as if Christianity were true.” (p. 199)

“The doctrine of creation is the epistemological guarantee that the constitution of our human faculties conforms to the structure of the external world. …Christianity was necessary to lay the groundwork for the empirical methodology of science.” (p. 115)

These are some pretty bold claims. My question is, does she go too far?

Is there a different worldview that can provide an adequate epistemology for science?

Was there a pre-Christian science and if so what did it look like?

47 thoughts on “Same Sex Science

  1. It is often asserted that modern science had it’s roots in Christian culture and could in fact only have gotten started given such a milieu.

    I’d be inclined to change that to “nominally Christian culture”, and I think it is far from clear that it could not have started elsewhere.

    The culture where science developed was also colonial, with quite a bit of racism and genocide. It isn’t entirely clear what aspects of the culture were most important, but I doubt that it was the theology.

    “Only a biblical worldview provides an adequate epistemology for science.” (p. 197)

    No, it does not provide an adequate epistemology. Nor does secular philosophy, for that matter. But perhaps the only epistemology that science needs, is mathematics.

    “To do science, even the most hard-boiled atheist must function as if Christianity were true.” (p. 199)

    This is certainly false.

    These are some pretty bold claims. My question is, does she go too far?

    Too far for what? As apologetics and Christian propoganda, I’m not sure that there is a “too far”. However, I would not consider it a scholarly analysis of science and its origins.

  2. Yes, the modern scientific process was devil oped in a culture that was nominally Christian, but that doesn’t mean that Christianity was required for it.

    But China, Greece, the Romans, the arabs and the Egyptians made many discoveries that must be classified as scientific.

  3. Adapa: What does the title have to do with the contents of the OP?

    I’m quite wiling to participate in a discussion on this topic, but the title of the OP is thoroughly mysterious to me. (Unless Mung was going for a pun on Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, in which case the joke is clear enough.)

    In any event, the disconnect between the title and the contents is enough to dissuade me from participating.

  4. In figuring out how the universe works/manipulating it I DON’T think religious presumptions matter at all.
    Seeing the creater behind everything and so machine like and so easily figured out SEEMS to fit fine with everyone. Islam would do that too.
    Naw. They are missing the point of science. its about smarter accomplishment.

    I say its simply a rise in the general mean of the common people and so our science did better then all those before. We simply were and are smarter.
    I reject the word Judeo-Christian as thats a modern term to include the Jews.
    They were not relevant to historic christian civililzation. in fact if others were it would be the islamic civilization that indeed early Europe was taught by.
    I don’t see that Roman catholic Europe gets the credit for modern science .
    Its almost entirely from the protestant peoples/nations until recently.

    Therefore the better idea, I say, is that , like in other ways, protestantism changed the common peasant. The common man got more smart/motivated and this curve led to a better, not exclusive, curve in science.
    This is more evident in that the greater cirve of very protestant people, puritan etc, had even more science accomplishment. Therefore The English speaking civilization prevailed and to this day.
    Its not christian, even protestant, philosophy but simply the rise of the common people and so a rise in the upper classes of those people.
    It could of happened anywhere but protestantism uniquely affected the people with its passion .

    do these folks who give christianity the credit also give catholic and protestant equal credit.

    I do believe gods blessing was needed for his true people.
    yet i see very obvious curves in the graph and that its about human beings and motivation and then getting smart. Not more hard working.

    People just see big results and draw conclusions too quick.

  5. My view is that some times people need to just lighten up a bit.

    Participate in a discussion or don’t.

    It’s still a free country (sort of).

  6. OK Mung, what is your opinion?

    1) did Christianity “invent” science?
    2) Did Christianity create a culture in which science could develop?
    3) Is science “dependent” on Christianity?
    4) is science incidental to Christianity?

  7. I don’t see how it can be denied that Christian theology provided the vocabulary within which early modern scientists understood what they were doing and why it was worth doing. This issue has been pretty well studied by scholars of the transition to modernity. I’m most familiar with Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Funkenstein) and Passage to Modernity (Dupre), but I don’t doubt that there are many more (and better) books and articles on this subject. In particular I’ve heard very good things about The Theological Origins of Modernity and The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Also, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, which I hadn’t even heard of, also looks very intriguing.

    But presumably Pearcey isn’t just interested in the origins of modern science; she seems to think that the origins of modern science have implications for contemporary scientific practice, philosophy of science, and epistemology. That doesn’t make any sense to me. It looks like one big non sequitur.

    Consider: Athenian democracy made sense to the Athenians in terms of their worldview, which included a great deal of myth, legend, quasi- or proto-metaphysics, and so on. But it was in those terms that their social practice was developed, innovated, and made intelligible to them. Would we say that our contemporary practice of democracy requires that we adopt the Athenian worldview? Or that our democracy can’t make sense to us without it?

    That seems utterly bizarre.

    But if it is, then why would science be any different from democracy? Why not think that our scientific practices can make sense to us in ways quite different from how the originators of modern science made sense of their scientific practices?

    Without an answer to the question as to why science is any different from democracy, Pearcey’s argument doesn’t work.

  8. Is there a different worldview that can provide an adequate epistemology for science?

    Yes. It can be found in the three great works of John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, Experience and Nature, and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.

    The heart of Dewey’s philosophy is the ongoing dynamical transactions between organisms and their environments. An organism encounters its environment as a “situation”, and the situation is “problematic” insofar as the environment fails to permit the satisfaction of the organism’s needs. Some organisms — very few, in fact — have evolved the ability to resolve problematic situations by learning — either how to modify their own behavior or by how to modify the environment. The ability to learn, which we see throughout animate nature, is the biological basis of the ability to do science.

    Was there a pre-Christian science and if so what did it look like?

    Arguably even the “Christian science” of the high middle ages was Aristotelian science welded onto Catholic theology. That was ancient Greek science seems hard to deny. Likewise there is Chinese science, Indian science, and so on. Science seems to emerge whenever there is a civilization that depends on industry and trade. It’s not that special. We should refrain from Western exceptionalism.

  9. Kantian Naturalist: Some organisms — very few, in fact — have evolved the ability to resolve problematic situations by learning — either how to modify their own behavior or by how to modify the environment.

    Populations modify their genomes.

  10. petrushka: Populations modify their genomes.

    Yes.

    Dewey’s point is that there’s continuity between how animals learn and how humans reason, including the form of reasoning called science. Hence our ability to do science is consistent with a roughly post-Darwinian understanding of what human beings are. Dewey provides a fully naturalistic philosophy of science; we don’t need epistemological foundations drawn from theological metaphysics in order to understand what science is, how it is possible, or why it is valuable.

  11. Kantian Naturalist,

    O deny christian theology language made any difference . They had plenty of time to advance science during the catholic civilization. Nothing happened and other civilizations could say they trumped them. Islam, Chinese.
    the difference only came from protestantism. Otherwise it was very few people doing very little.
    I think its obvious science grew with the intellectual curve rising for the common people in protestant nations. SIMPLE. Just as today all nations are rising as their population gets smarter/educated. not because of free enterprise capitalism as they say or democracy.
    Science is always seen as done by smarter people. is this true? well maybe its simply better science comes from smarter people.
    So raise the general iq and one will see a rise in accomplishment in science.
    Its not christian doctrines but simply passionate Christianity raising the common people for the first time in human history.
    Itsw all about identity and iQ.

  12. “Its not christian doctrines but simply passionate Christianity raising the common people for the first time in human history.”

    Is this the same passionate Christianity that was used to justify slavery? Or the same passionate Christianity that was used by the KKK to justify itself? Or the same passionate Christianity that was used to convict people of witchcraft and burn them at the stake in Salem? Or the same passionate Christianity that justified the Westoboro babtist church to protest at funerals of US soldiers?

    Do you really want me to go on?

  13. Kantian Naturalist: Hence our ability to do science is consistent with a roughly post-Darwinian understanding of what human beings are. Dewey provides a fully naturalistic philosophy of science; we don’t need epistemological foundations drawn from theological metaphysics in order to understand what science is, how it is possible, or why it is valuable.

    And yet Darwin did science without Dewey’s philosophy of science, as did Newton, and as have endless others both past and present.

    You can try to replace the “epistemological foundations drawn from theological metaphysics” with Dewey’s philosophy of science, but in the attempt you merely prove the point.

  14. Robert Byers:

    Science is always seen as done by smarter people. is this true? well maybe its simply better science comes from smarter people.

    🙂

  15. petrushka,

    No. Or rather, it doesn’t seem right, but I may have misunderstood. Genomes change, by various means, but it isn’t the population changing them. A genome changes in an individual (due to mutation, recombination or – just maybe – divine interference). The change becomes fixed, lost or scrambled in time within the population due to selection and drift (or divine micro-tweaking). So allele frequencies change in the population, but that’s not really the population changng its genome either.

    Although populations can be a selective force in themselves – eg frequency-dependent selection – that really means that s values change, rather than that the population is ‘changing its genome’. That smacks too much of Shapiro for my tastes!

  16. Mung: And yet Darwin did science without Dewey’s philosophy of science, as did Newton, and as have endless others both past and present.

    You can try to replace the “epistemological foundations drawn from theological metaphysics” with Dewey’s philosophy of science, but in the attempt you merely prove the point.

    No, I think you’re missing my point pretty much completely.

    I took you to be asking if there was a philosophically adequate alternative to theological metaphysics as a “foundation” for empirical science, given that theological metaphysics played a substantive role in shaping early modern science. I suggested that Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism would satisfy that criterion.

    The fact that Darwin and Newton weren’t pragmatic naturalists (and of course could not have been!) is irrelevant to the point I’m making. You asked if there was an alternative to theological metaphysics as a “foundation” to science; I answered the question.

    For that matter, it is actually not clear to me what role theism played for Newton — to what extent is Newton’s methodology of science or any of mathematical or physical results dependent on his somewhat heterodox Anglicanism? Perhaps it played some role in why he saw physics as valuable or possible, but that doesn’t mean it played any substantive role in how he did physics. And it surely doesn’t rule out the space for alternative conceptions of why science is valuable or possible!

    Whether pragmatic naturalism is a better “foundation” for empirical science than theism is, is a question we haven’t even begun to address — and I very much doubt it is answerable one way or the other in a non-circular fashion.

  17. I wonder …. if I call myself a scientist, am I a scientist? If I choose to define science in a way that is different from how mainstream scientists define science, do they have the right to tell me I’m not doing science? Or are they just narrow-minded bigots?

    What right do some people have to insist on one definition of a term – like “free will” or “morality” or “marriage” or “science”? They don’t own the definition. Right? I’m not bound by their parochial perspectives.

    So, I’m a scientist. And my views are all scientific. I’ve conducted my own scientific experiments and have come to scientific conclusions. My views are all scientific fact.

    You know, I think I’m going to like this ability to simply redefine things as I see fit.

  18. William, the fact that language is fluid doesn’t make it a matter of you or me choosing what any of these terms mean. Courts can do it for legal purposes. In the sciences, a sort of consensus is required.

    Sorry, though.

  19. walto,

    Yeah, I think that Murray is really going to have trouble with the idea that social statuses are constituted by intersubjective recognition. Good luck trying, though.

  20. In the sciences, a sort of consensus is required.

    Consensus = whatever William J. Murray says. Fun! Fun! Fun! I am the consensus.

  21. William J. Murray: I wonder …. if I call myself a scientist, am I a scientist?

    Only results matter. How have you added to the sum total of human knowledge? Not a whit.

  22. Again, William, just as you don’t get to decide what “marriage” or “science” means, you also don’t get to decide what “consensus” means.

    Sorry.

  23. William J. Murray:
    I wonder …. if I call myself a scientist, am I a scientist? If I choose to define science in a way that is different from how mainstream scientists define science, do they have the right to tell me I’m not doing science?Or are they just narrow-minded bigots?

    What right do some people have to insist on one definition of a term – like “free will” or “morality” or “marriage” or “science”?They don’t own the definition. Right?I’m not bound by their parochial perspectives.

    So, I’m a scientist.And my views are all scientific.I’ve conducted my own scientific experiments and have come to scientific conclusions.My views are all scientific fact.

    You know, I think I’m going to like this ability to simply redefine things as I see fit.

    You can define things however you want, as long as you make it clear what you mean.

  24. Elizabeth, while he, of course CAN define things the way he likes (so long as he’s clear), it will obviously be very confusing for him to use terms that are already in wide circulation and define them differently. I therefore suggest that he coin “shmience”, “shmarriage”, “conshmensus”, etc.

  25. “Everyone knows that if terms have no fixed, unalterable, and eternal meaning, then it’s up to each and every individual to decide for him or herself what a term means! That’s just how language works!”

    — said no competent linguist or philosopher of language ever.

  26. Kantian Naturalist: “Everyone knows that if terms have no fixed, unalterable, and eternal meaning, then it’s up to each and every individual to decide for him or herself what a term means! That’s just how language works!”

    — said no competent linguist or philosopher of language ever.

    Ayep. There’s a reason we laugh at Humpty Dumpty. 🙂

  27. Kantian Naturalist:
    “Everyone knows that if terms have no fixed, unalterable, and eternal meaning, then it’s up to each and every individual to decide for him or herself what a term means! That’s just how language works!”

    — said no competent linguist or philosopher of language ever.

    It is a lovely false dichotomy, no? I guess the next best to getting yourself an appointment on the U.S. Supreme Court, is pretending you can do what they can do anyhow.

    I hear it’s even more fun if you wear a robe while pretending!

  28. walto:
    Elizabeth, while he, of course CAN define things the way he likes (so long as he’s clear), it will obviously be very confusing for him to use terms that are already in wide circulation and define them differently.I therefore suggest that he coin “shmience”, “shmarriage”, “conshmensus”, etc.

    Oh, indeed. But it’s an important point in scientific methodology nonetheless, where our operational definitions are often not those in widespread use. And in law for that matter.

    And it would also save trouble. If those opposed to gay marriage, for instance, simply said: well that’s not how I define marriage, there wouldn’t be a problem.

  29. Maybe–I’m not sure. I mean, suppose I tell my wife, “Well, all I ever meant by ‘marriage’ was the willingness to have brunch together occasionally; it’s never connoted any other obligations to me.”

    I think I might get a beating. 🙂

  30. Kantian Naturalist: No, I think you’re missing my point pretty much completely.

    Five new books came in yesterday. I wasn’t on my best game. Unless I was actually trying to miss your point. =P

    Started the Hilary Putnam book on Pragmatism.

    If pragmatic naturalism can provide an epistemological basis for science, why hasn’t it? Surely naturalism is nothing new. Was something else needed?

    What would you think of calling Aristotle’s science pragmatic naturalism?

  31. WJM: “I wonder …. if I call myself a scientist, am I a scientist?

    Yes.

    “If I choose to define science in a way that is different from how mainstream scientists define science, do they have the right to tell me I’m not doing science?

    No. But they have the right to tell you you are doing bad science.

    “Or are they just narrow-minded bigots?”

    Might be. Even scientists can be bigots.

  32. Mung: If pragmatic naturalism can provide an epistemological basis for science, why hasn’t it? Surely naturalism is nothing new. Was something else needed?

    Well, there are a lot of contingent historical reasons as to why pragmatism in general, and Dewey in particular, have been swept away by the force of intellectual history. These days one can get a BA or BS, MA, and PhD (or D. Phil) in philosophy at any major research university in the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, or Australia and never take a class in American philosophy or be exposed to any of the great thinkers of American pragmatism.

    It’s my conviction that pragmatic naturalism is conceptually adequate, yes, but I’m a distinct minority, with regard to professional philosophers. And I’m not sure that practicing scientists need to read Dewey, though I wish they would.

    What would you think of calling Aristotle’s science pragmatic naturalism?

    Here’s certainly a forerunner of it, yes. But with one huge caveat:

    The main conceptual distance between Aristotle and Dewey, as I see it, is that it’s not a possibility for Aristotle that experience could lead to a revision of the basic categories (e.g. those of the Categories). Though Aristotle does give us a beautiful description of how we experience change in things, there’s a rigidity in the most generic descriptions of reality. The categories are immune to revision, and so are the morphe or forms themselves. Although there’s some room for accommodating motion and change in the perceptible world — Aristotle’s response to Parmenides, Plato, and Democritus is not a bad one! — at the most generic level, Aristotle’s philosophy is as static as those of his post-Parmenidean predecessors.

    By contrast, Dewey is perfectly open to the possibility that the most basic categories in terms of which make anything intelligible are themselves revisable. It’s a point that Dewey inherits from Hegel, who in turn was influenced by the ancient pre-Parmenidean philosopher Heraclitus in a way no one was before him (and only Nietzsche even more so since). In Dewey’s philosophy, dynamism, change, and BECOMING go “all the way up”, to the most generic aspects of intelligibility.

  33. Acartia: Even scientists can be bigots.

    Given that “bigot” means “scientist” it is not just that scientists can be bigots but that scientists are bigots!

    Do try to keep up.

  34. Acartia:
    “Its not christian doctrines but simply passionate Christianity raising the common people for the first time in human history.”

    Is this the same passionate Christianity that was used to justify slavery? Or the same passionate Christianity that was used by the KKK to justify itself? Or the same passionate Christianity that was used to convict people of witchcraft and burn them at the stake in Salem? Or the same passionate Christianity that justified the Westoboro babtist church to protest at funerals of US soldiers?

    Do you really want me to go on?

    Your sampling and then its useless. Passionate Christianity was always good and never bad. Bringing up obscure incidents is unrelated to the great flow and time of Christian influence since the protestant reformation.
    People forget or dislike just how protestant the modern world is.
    We are more protestant then Muslim nations are influenced by Islam or the orient by their things.

  35. I can’t for the life of me imagine a scenario where the Biblical anything matters. I mean, it’s nice to have a record of a guy who became enlightened or whatever happened with Jesus, but, what import does it have at all? It isn’t exactly a handbook of useful information..

  36. William J. Murray: ID is a proven, scientific fact. This is great!

    Given “proof” and “fact” are irrelevant to if you believe things or not, why does it matter?

    I guess it must be because after all, proof and facts do matter, otherwise you’d not have made that comment.

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