Why Then, Why There? The Christian West and the Scientific Revolution, Part 1

By Melissa Cain Travis

Prior to what we regard as the birth of modern science in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, various types of quantitative astronomy had been practiced in multiple cultures since early Antiquity. Surviving cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia containing star catalogs and celestial observations date back to the second millennium BCE. What we’ve learned is that Bronze Age scribes in cities such as Babylon predicted positions of the visible planets hundreds of years into the future, and by approximately the middle of the first millennium BCE, a type of mathematical astronomy had emerged. The British Museum houses multiple cuneiform tablets that demonstrate things like calculations of the path of Jupiter using a rudimentary form of integral calculus. This work gave rise (in different ways and to varying degrees) to ancient Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Greek astronomy.

If mathematical astronomy was practiced in all these different civilizations before the rise of Christianity, why is it that the scientific revolution occurred in a Western Christian context when it did? Recently, this question came up in—of all places—The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. To the surprise of many, Rogan invited Dr. Stephen C. Meyer to his show to discuss the philosophy and science related to intelligent design. About twenty minutes into the three-hour interview, Meyer mentioned the importance of the intelligibility of the universe and Rogan then suggested that any curious, self-aware species with sufficient intelligence would eventually produce science. Meyer took this as an opportunity to address the so-called “Why then, why there?” question about the birth of modern science:

 We’ve had all these great civilizations. The Egyptians made the pyramids…the Chinese had gunpowder, the Romans built aqueducts; but for some reason, in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries—and I think the antecedents for that go back a little further—you get these very systematic methods for studying nature arising. And you get this concern to use mathematics to describe the order in nature. You get this incredibly productive—historians of science call it the “scientific revolution”—something really dramatic changing, and it’s different than other civilizations…The material substrate, or the things you would need to do science were in all the other cultures, and there were many great cultures, but this systematic method of studying nature uniquely arose in Western Europe in a particular time and a particular context. Many, many historians of science have come to the conclusion that…the difference that made the difference was the worldview, was the philosophical assumptions of those Western European scientists who were almost entirely coming out of a Judeo-Christian worldview. One of the key assumptions that they had was that systematic study of nature was actually possible. It’s actually very hard to do science, it’s very hard to see a pattern in what can initially seem to be a chaotic jumble of sense data. These thinkers had the conviction that there were such patterns, there was rationality, there was order behind things because there was a God who had made the universe to be orderly and to be understood…The people with a particular religious faith had a reason to pursue science that, apparently, other cultures did not have to the same degree.[1]

The next to last sentence in this extended quote is particularly important and deserves further elaboration (which isn’t practical for a podcast, but great for an essay). I agree with Meyer on the point he made here, but I want to add what I believe is another remarkable dimension to the discussion about cosmic intelligibility.