Saturday, March 5, 2011

Faith and the First Scientists


This post is a continuation from The inquisition strikes back
Standing upon the shoulders of giants, it was the British physicist Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) who can be considered the true father of modern physics – based on solid mathematical models. Newton work evolved science in four different areas: his work of the nature of light, his laws of motion, his development of Calculus, and the laws of universal gravitation. Each of these works would have been considered a life time achievement and would have suffice to place him as one of the greatest scientists of all time. Newton achieved them all.

His law of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion could explain the motion of bodies on earth and the motion of the planets bodies. This was a blow to the Church's worldview in which the rules that governed the ‘corrupt’ transient earth were different from the laws obeyed by the perfect eternal heavens. According to Newton, the laws of nature were universal, and applied equally to earth and heavens. The Aristotelian model of the universe had to be replaced, and so was the Church's hegemony of knowledge. The workings of the universe became the realm of science.

While the new scientific way of thinking was partially responsible for the decline in the power of the Church, the resultant image of the world neither threatened the fundamentals of faith, nor replaced the need for a creator. For many scientists, revealing the nature of the world was the way to understanding the creation and the glory of God. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, were all devout believers who saw their scientific work as a religious undertaking. For example, Kepler wrote in his Harmony of the Worlds:

Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God's own likeness. ... It is absolutely necessary that the work of such a Creator be of the greatest beauty.

Although these scientists were aware of the objections their work would provoke, they did not consider the new discoveries to contradict religious teachings. They held the view that the scriptures, written for everyone to understand, were not to be taken literally. Any contradiction between religious teachings and the scientific discoveries was due to human’s mistaken interpretation. They believed that correct knowledge of the cosmos would provide a better insight into the scriptures, and that it was our pious responsibility to reinterpret the texts to match the known facts, as there should be no inconsistency between science and the scriptures when they were rightly understood.

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