Christianity: A Cause of Modern Science

10In short, both belief in eternal time cycles and in nature as one huge organismencourage the passivity that opposes the mentally active, investigating spirit ofscience, such as shown by Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)dissecting carcasses, instead of just meditating and contemplating passivelydeep within a forest about Nature.CHINESE CONCEPTIONS OF THE LAWS OF NATUREThe Chinese believed nature both was orderly and had an actual existence(when not influenced by the rather pervasive, Hindu-derived Buddhist ideas ofmaya, the belief all is illusion). However, they lacked the concept of natural law,as ordained by a personal God, which assured nature was rationallyunderstandable to mankind's mind:It was not that there was no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that itwas not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was noconviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesserearthly languages the divine code of laws which he had decreed aforetime.For a man who was a Marxist (and, admittedly, simultaneously, a very liberalProtestant), this must have been a very hard concession to make, as Jakiobserved, for it points to an ideological cause for why modern science did notappear in China, not an economic or political cause. In contrast, the view of howChristianity's concept of the rationality of God was tied to the rise of science inthe West is best stated by the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead(1861-1947):I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatestcontribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I meanthe inexpungable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with itsantecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. . . .When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of othercivilizations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. Itmust come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived aswith the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek