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God’s faithful Word means the reliability of science’s laws

Your religion determines your view of reality; it affects everything about your world & how you see it.  Whether we create our own from our own perspective or that religious perspective is given to us by someone else, we end up shaping our reality around it because we have decided it is the reality behind our reality, so to speak.

Imagine for a moment that the reality governing your view of reality were something like this:  All existence came from “a huge egg in the womb of a deity with bisexual powers.” Or what if existence came from “fathomless waters representing the body of Vishnu where, out of every hair-follicle, a universe bubbled forth and broke up before long? As Jaki explains: “This image was just as inconducive to strict reasoning about the actual universe as was the breathing of Vishnu, supposedly regulating his body motions, including his perspiration that triggered the appearance of those bubble-worlds.” (See Jaki’s book The Savior of Science above.)

Joseph Needham, an expert on the history of science in China, also considered the problem of China’s tendency toward Patheism. Jaki discusses Needham’s thoughts:

“To his own consternation and to the bafflement of many of his readers, he felt impelled to fall back on a theological consideration. Its essence is the parting of the pre-Confucian Chinese with their erstwhile belief in an only God (Creator) and Lawgiver. Once this belief (for whose existence Needham saw convincing evidence in early Chinese lore) was replaced by a quasi-pantheistic identification of man and society with Nature writ large, the Chinese of old, so Needham argued, had an intellectual failure of nerve. They no longer felt confident that their limited mind could grasp and control the laws of Nature because Nature itself was not subject to a Mind and Lawgiver who transcended it.” (Jaki’s The Savior of Science, above)

Imagine that your god is the entire universe itself, Pantheism. How do you, with confidence, study, take apart, & even seek to control your god without denying your god?

Or imagine that your god is the entire universe itself, Pantheism.  How do you study, take apart, & even seek to control your god without denying your god?

Or imagine you believed the world is mere matter, with no intelligent being determining anything reliable about it, & that this world undergoes eternal cycles of rebirth.  Add the idea that work in the material world is beneath you, and you have the Greek scientists, for the most part.

Jaki explains:  “. . . Aristotle, as befits a genuine Greek pagan, asserts the eternity of the universe as a self-evident truth. An immediate corollary of this was the motion, uninterrupted and unslackening since eternity, of the starry sphere and of the lower heavenly bodies.” (See Jaki’s book The Savior of Science above.)

Why would you need to alter the physical world if it will return to a Golden Age inevitably even without your help?  And why dirty your hands with physical labor to study & control anything about it?  In such an environment, scientists could perhaps discover, but modern science could not prosper & advance.

What was different about Western Culture?  It’s probably impossible to pin it down to one thing or event, but there was a landmark event in 1214 A.D. –  the Fourth Lateran Council decreed “that all creation, spiritual and material, was created ex nihilo and in tempore,” which according to Jaki, “could only reinforce an already strong adherence to both points.” (Jaki’s The Savior of Science, above)  This is the philosophical/religious backdrop for a man named Buridan who lived a century after that Council & well before Sir Isaac Newton.

“. . . the temporality of the universe is a fact for Buridan, the Christian natural philosopher. In this respect he is but one of countless other Christian intellectuals, a single though precious drop in a vast culture or cultural consciousness.

“That culture was not only vastly different in that respect from all other previous cultures, but precisely because of this it also had a tremendous advantage over them.The advantage was that of one who in possession of a fact can naturally devote himself to the task of speculating about the manner in which that fact appears in reality.”

(See Jaki’s book The Savior of Science above.)  According to Jaki, Buridan’s studies/postulates were the precursor to Newton’s First Law of Motion.

“Anticipation is taken here in that sound evolutionary sense that suggests unfolding and is not that cheap trick whereby full-grown grown rabbits are pulled out of a hat.”  Also, “. . . science proceeds by collecting small data. . . . Contrary to Bacon’s expectations, the history of modern science showed not only that guiding ideas were fruitful, but also that their fruitfulness could be proportional to their sweeping character. It should therefore seem very scientific that Buridan put a cosmic capstone on his formulation of inertial motion in terms of the impetus theory.”

(See Jaki’s book The Savior of Science above.)  In other words, when Newton said that he had stood on the shoulders of giants, he was not being falsely humble or stating something that lacked historical accuracy for the sake of rhetoric.  In fact, he did build on the work of others.  Thus, science progressed. But how was that progress different from that of the ancient Greeks, for example? Jaki explains this way:

To be cont’d.