I
FOOD: FOR THOUGHT	CHRISTIANITY, CRADLE OF SCIENCE
	     Fr Francis Marsden    for 11/8/91

We build nuclear power stations while tribes in Africa and South America sit round campfires of sticks and peat. We develop disease— resistant breeds of livestock while starving Hindus in Indian villages won’t lay a finger on their sacred cows. The Arabs would still be travelling by camel had we not developed jet airliners for them to buy with oil money: oil that would still be lying beneath the desert sands had western companies not developed the technology to drill for it and extract it.

This is not a catalogue in favour of white supremacy. It is to drive home the point that scientific progress and technical prowess have developed in Europe and North America way ahead of other civilisations on this planet. They have given the West a prominent and powerful position in world affairs.

However science and technology have been a mixed blessing: camels and campfires are much less ecologically harmful than nuclear reactors and jet aircraft. The pace of life and of change in the West have eroded spiritual and moral values. However many advantages of science are undeniable: bicycles, telephones, electricity, electric light, glasses, clean drinking water, dentist’s drills, antibiotics and anaesthetics, radio and photography. What would life be like without them? Many of us would not be alive or physically healthy were it not for science.

Always technology can be a blessing or a curse, used for good or evil: hydro-electric power stations or atom bombs, life-saving medicines or the abortion-causing contraceptive Pill, sanitation or pollution.

I want to reflect today on the question: Why is it that science developed in our European Christian civilisat ion? And not in the treat and sophisticated civilisations of China and India, Egypt, Greece or the Muslim world?

All these other cultures had a well—organised society which allowed some people to spend their time thinking and reflecting on the world, without having to worry where their next meal was coming from. Yet they did not develop science. Is that mere chance, or is there a particular link between Christianity and science, which was missing elsewhere. Let us think what conditions we need for science to grow.

Firstly we need certain beliefs about the nature of the world. It seems obvious to us that the world is good end worthy of study. That is because we have grown up in a Judaeo—Christian culture, rooted in the Genesis creation account: “God created the earth and the heavens and He saw that it was good”. And God said to man: “Be fruitful. Fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters  of every living creature.” There is the scientist’s charter from God. But we do not find this outlook in the eastern religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. To them, matter is an illusion. It is bad. Only the spiritual is real. Therefore it is a waste of time to explore or study the natural world. And so Asia has not developed scientifically. In contrast, the Incarnation of Christ, God coming as man and working as a carpenter, teaches us to value the material world and technical skill.

For scientific progress there also has to be the belief that the material world behaves regularly and reliably. What is true today in my experimental results will be true tomorrow. If however you are an animist, and you believe that every tree, river, stone, mountain and wind has its own spirit which controls its activity — then you will think that matter behaves capriciously, at the will of fickle spirits, gods or demons. What point is there then in scientific inquiry? It will only anger the demons, trying to prise their secrets from them. Evil will come of it. Better to placate the spirits and offer sacrifice to them, so they do us no harm. And so the pagan tribes offer their useless sacrifices to the river—god, the sun—god, the moon—god, the fertility-god.

The scientist needs to have strong motivation. Nature does not give up her secrets easily. There are many setbacks and frustrations. He must love truth and beauty for their own sake. He must believe that the created world is rational and its mechanisms call be understood by our rational minds. The Christian believes that our intellects are created “in the image and likeness of God”, and that the world is rational because it has been designed by a rational Creator. It is the scientist’s privilege “to think God’s thoughts after Him.”

This line of reasoning is not so prominent in Islam as it is in Christianity. For the Muslim whatever happens “is the will of Allah.’t Why did Newton’s apple fall from the tree? “It is the will of Allah.” If Allah decided differently tomorrow, the apple would fly off into outer space. It is wrong to kill because A11ah says so -  not because of a moral law written into creation. So if Allah said tomorrow that it was right to kill, it would be right to kill.

Although Arabic civilisation excelled in mathematics and invented algebra in the early middle ages, and produced beautiful mosques, it never developed technically as did the West.

The other motive driving the scientist, one hopes, is that of improving the lot of his fellow man. “Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked” are Christ’s comandments. Contrast this with the 9 castes of Hinduism, of which the lowest is the desperately poor untouchables. Would a religious Hindu not try to improve their lot? No, because by the law of karma (reincarnation) they are sick or poor on account of their misdeeds in an earlier existence, it would be useless, indeed wrong, to help the poor. To alleviate their pain would mean they still had to go through it in yet another reincarnation.

Hence although India is a very spiritual country, it has never progreseed much materially. It is strangled by its Hindu belief in karma. Time is like a wheel, a circle of fate in which we are trapped and from which we cannot escape. Everything repeats itself. It is useless to try. In contrast the Christian has a linear idea of time, running from the Creation to the Resurrection of Christ, and finally his Second Coming on the Last Day.

Progress in science also needs a ‘community of believers’ who share the understanding that results are shared, published and debated, not jealously guarded as secrets. It requires individuals who have great respect for truth, however disappointing or annoying or elusive the truth may be.

Many of the early scientists were devout Christians. Buridan (d. 1356) and Oresme (d. 13S2) started the idea of momentum, which led on after Copernicus’ (a Polish priest) astronomy to Galileo’s theory of the motion of the planets round the sun, and Newton’s laws of motion, the basis of classical physics. Galileo was actually condemned for his reinterpretations of the Book of Genesis, and kept under house arrest in the villa of the Archbishop of Florence. Newton wrote far more on Scripture than he ever did on physics.

Louis Pasteur, inventor of vaccination, was a Catholic daily communicant. Gregor Mendel, founder of genetics, was a Benedictine monk of Brno. Joseph Priestly, father of British chemistry, was an active Non—Conformist. Kepler, Boyle and Maxwell were all believers, as indeed was the great Einstein.

The lie that science and Christianity are opposed is an invention of the French encyclopedia writers, Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert in the 1760’s. Their sceptical attitude has entered modern uninformed thinking. It has been reinforced by such episodes as the controversy with Darwin over evolution, and by continual rehashes and curtain—calls of the Church’s handling of Galileo.

In fact, surveys among university students reveal a higher level of religious belief and comittment among science students than among arts students. Many modern scientists are believers, but the old myth persists.

Science grew up in a society formed by the Christian world—view, and conditioned by several centuries of Catholic theology, with its precise, rigorous and logical ways of thought.

Science came to birth in a Christian cradle. It always needs Christian morality to guide its development. Otherwise it becomes unscrupulous and brutal. Atheistic ways of thinking which deny the existence of absolute truth, actually undermine the foundations of science too.

The fate of science under Marxist—Leninism is a case in point. The Soviet state condemned Einstein’s theory of relativity and the theory of molecular bonding. It destroyed genetics in the 1930’s by putting the party hack and fake scientist Lysenko in charge, who ”discovered” whatever would please Stalin, and the Party. The greatest Russian geneticist of the day, Vavilov, was exiled to his death in Siberia — something the Church never did to Galileo. In my own experience of chemistry research, my Professor at Cambridge was amused when I turned up a hopefully useful reaction from a Russian chemical journal. Try it, he said, but you can never rely on them: sometimes they work, sometimes they’re hopeless. It must have been very difficult for Soviet scientists when you needed KGB permission to use a photocopier.

The background and inspiration of science is deeply Christian. It is where science becomes the tool of godless economic or military systems that it is abused. In the words of one great physicist, Max Planck: “There can never be any opposition between religion and science because one is the complement of the other.”