Christian Creationism and the Rise of Modern Science

Abstract: The Christian doctrine of creation is the metaphysical foundation of modern science, and an important thread for sorting out the historical relationship between science and religion. Foster’s essay “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science” represents a typical line of thought: it emphasizes the connection between God’s free will and the empirical tendency of modern science, though its argumentative details are open to question. The key is to clarify the general points of the Christian doctrine of creation and the ways these points correspond to the characteristic features of modern science. The doctrine of creation, at the very least, includes four aspects: 1. There is a clear boundary between God and created beings; 2. Creation means that God’s authority is above the world; 3. It means that creation is good; 4. Human beings are created in the image of God. And these four points can in turn correspond respectively to several aspects of modern science: 1. the rise of the mechanistic view of nature, or the stripping away of externality; 2. the subjection of the real world to natural law; 3. the intrinsic value of empirical research; 4. anthropocentrism and the God’s-eye view.

 

Keywords: Christianity; creationism; modern science

 

I. Introduction

The origin of modern science lies in ancient Greece, but it was also born in the soil of Christian culture. In addition to social incentives, intellectual historians generally believe that Christianity contributed certain metaphysical premises or background conditions to the origins of modern science. For example, Professor Wu Guosheng points out: “Free will, anthropocentrism, and Genesis … constitute the three major presuppositions of modern science”[1]

In fact, the three presuppositions Professor Wu mentions all relate to Genesis. The first point refers to the way Christianity transformed the ancient Greek conception of freedom, according to which “freedom equals rationality”—from the moment of “stealing and eating the forbidden fruit,” human beings gained the freedom to choose sin; second, the Christian God created human beings in his own image and made them “caretakers” of all things, thus fostering anthropocentrism; third, God as an omnipotent creator external to the world made possible a mechanistic picture of the world.

No wonder Hooykaas believed that, despite having long since been secularized, today’s natural science still implicitly rests on this metaphysical foundation, which “derives mainly from biblical ideas about God and creation”[2]

As we know, in tracing the historical relationship between science and religion, Christian creationism has always been a key issue. Throughout history, Genesis has been the place where Christianity came into direct collision with science; whether one says that science and religion are as incompatible as fire and water, or says that they are compatible and complementary, the doctrine of creation will be involved first.

In recent years, however, discussions of creationism and science have focused more on the new problems raised by evolution or Big Bang cosmology, while the relationship between the doctrine of creation and the origins of modern science has been discussed relatively less. Broadly speaking, there is no great controversy over the existence of a thousand threads of connection between Christian creationism and modern science. Yet how these connections are ordered logically in terms of priority and subordination, and how they unfold historically in terms of development and transformation, still needs to be clarified.

 

II. A Critique of a Typical Line of Thought

An earlier specialized discussion of this theme can be traced to Michael Foster’s 1934 essay “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science”[3]. This essay represents a typical line of thought and has had considerable influence; Hooykaas[4], Ian Barbour[5], Alister McGrath[6], and other scholars have all cited it.

But in fact Foster’s line of thought is fairly simple. Ian Barbour accurately summarizes its gist:

“… he claims that the biblical doctrine of creation made a unique contribution to the rise of experimental science because it combined the ideas of rationality and contingency. If God is rational, then the world is orderly. But if God is also free, then the world need not have the particular order it now has. Therefore we can understand the world only by observation, not by trying, as the Greeks did, to deduce its order from necessary first principles. The Fathers held that God, by an act of free will, created matter and form out of nothing, and did not merely impose preexisting eternal forms upon matter.”[7]

This line of thought contains three links: first, God is understood as absolutely free will; second, modern science is understood as marked by empirical investigation; and third, the world is full of contingency—this is both the result of God’s exercise of free will and the reason empirical investigation becomes necessary.

Indeed, “many different early scientists were particularly supportive of the view that God could freely choose what to create and how to create it; this was called the doctrine of divine volition. For example, … Boyle said in Reason and Religion: ‘God (is) the author of the universe, the free institutour of the laws of motion… (these laws) depend perfectly upon his will…’”[8]

A similar line of thought is stated even more clearly in Cotes’s 1713 preface to Newton’s Principia:

“There is no doubt that the world we see, so rich in forms and so intricate in motion, cannot be anything other than the perfect free will of God, who guides and governs all things. From this source there emerge those laws which we call the laws of nature, in which there indeed appear many signs of the highest wisdom, yet not the slightest shadow of necessity. Therefore we must not seek these laws in uncertain conjectures, but should derive them from observation and experiment.”^[9]

We can see, then, that this line of thought is highly representative—but representative of whom, exactly? Note that Cotes and the others are clearly aiming their remarks at Cartesianists, representing an empiricist line of thought; the other rationalists were not necessarily persuaded. In the end, Newton’s capricious God did not defeat Leibniz’s God, and was ultimately removed by later generations from the Newtonian system. Thus this line of thought was perhaps neither the cause of the Scientific Revolution nor its result, but merely one voice among others in the process of its development.

In fact, all three links in this line of thought are highly questionable: must God be capricious rather than fully rational? Did the rise of modern science really bear the mark of empirical investigation? Does the world of modern science truly contain contingency?

Foster’s problem is that, starting from his own understanding, he depicts the features of the doctrine of creation and of modern science, but does not notice that neither of these is a simple, monolithic concept; both present themselves in diverse guises in history. Once one deliberately selects a certain interpretation of creationism and a certain definition of modern science, and then establishes the logical relation between them, one inevitably risks taking a part for the whole.

First, what exactly is the “Christian doctrine of creation”? Foster says it simply: nothing more than the idea that God is a creator with free will, rather than the Demiurge in the Timaeus, who fashions the world on the basis of preexisting forms and matter. But it must be noted that Christian theological theory itself also develops and changes. For example, this concept of a “Demiurge” is in fact the Gnostic understanding, and although Gnosticism is heretical, it is still one way of understanding Christian doctrine. As for orthodox theological interpretation, it underwent many changes from the patristic period to the Middle Ages, to the Reformation, and even to the present; the creator’s “free will” has not always been emphasized in this way.

Xu Zhiwei, in Introduction to Christian Theology, especially notes: “Modern and even early modern Christian theology, along with the currents of modernity, overemphasized God’s free will in creation while neglecting the love of creation… The result is an extremely contradictory theological predicament: the God of creation is a God who acts alone and arbitrarily, while the God of salvation is the Lord of love and mercy. From the standpoint of theological development, this explains why, in modern Christian theology, creation doctrine and salvation doctrine became severed from one another.”[10]

In other words, the situation may be this: the creation theology Foster describes, which especially stresses free will, is precisely a consequence of modernity rather than one of its causes. Was it creation theory that prompted the rise of modern science, or was it the rise of modern science and the entire accompanying process of modernization that eventually enabled a certain understanding of creation to prevail? The causal relation here is not clear.

Second, as for “the rise of modern science.” When Barbour quotes it, he changes this to “the rise of experimental science,” which is obviously much more accurate. But when we usually trace the rise of modern science, we point to the “from Copernicus to Newton” revolution in astronomy and natural philosophy (more akin to “theoretical physics”), and in this revolution the empiricist tradition of experimental science had not yet unfolded. The “modern science” Foster speaks of between the lines is really more like “modern philosophy.” He begins from the traditions of rationalism and empiricism, and mentions Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and even Kant, but says nothing about Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, or even Newton. Setting aside whether Foster’s interpretation of these philosophers is accurate, the key point is that it is still insufficient to speak of “experimental science” solely on the basis of these philosophers’ ideas, and it is even more questionable whether this can represent the features of “modern science.”

Thus, if we locate the “rise of modern science” in the astronomical-physical revolution from Copernicus to Newton, and if we also take into account the development of theological thought itself, then the rise of modern science simultaneously stimulated changes in Christian theology.

Of course, whether the dominant thread in the rise of modern science is really this mathematical thread of astronomy and physics is a matter of considerable dispute in the history of science. For example, advocates of chemistry argue that the thread “from alchemy to chemistry” is at least equally important, and that the alchemical tradition can be seen as the germ of experimental science; others point out that the technological environment and artisan traditions widely present in medieval Western Europe—windmills, watermills, mechanical clocks, and so on—promoted a greater emphasis on empirical research; moreover, the rise of printing also made it possible for empirical observation to be properly recorded and publicly circulated, thereby making the accumulation of experience possible and encouraging people’s interest in collecting observational records and empirical knowledge… In short, there are still many strands in the history of science pointing toward experimental science that seem to have no direct connection with Christian creationism. Even if we find that the later-developed tradition of experimental science coincides with the doctrine of Christian creationism, one possible explanation may be that the experimental science tradition induced by other strands in turn influenced the development of Christian creationism, or that the modern Christian view of creation and the modern scientific view of nature share a common source.

History, however, is always tangled and cannot be repeated, so it is very difficult to discern definite causal relations from it. Starting from the internal logic of intellectual history, we can also reconstruct certain narratives of cause and effect, and such causality in the sense of intellectual history does not necessarily have to match the temporal order of objective history. For example, Petrarch certainly came before Gutenberg, but without the aid of printing, humanism would probably not have become an all-consuming spirit of the age; once the Renaissance had already taken shape, it was natural to retrospectively acknowledge its precursors as earlier than printing. Yet without printing, Petrarch and the others would not necessarily have been granted epoch-making significance. We can still say that printing was one of the major causes of the Renaissance.

In this sense, although in the history of the Scientific Revolution the tradition of inductive-experimental science seems temporally later than the revolution in the mathematical tradition, if Christian creation doctrine did in fact logically lay the foundation for experimental science, then there is nothing wrong with saying that creationism was a motive force in the rise of modern science.

Foster noticed that Greek theological concepts—whether polytheism, pantheism, or the doctrines of Plato or Aristotle—could not provide sense experience with a solid epistemological status. What one obtains from sense experience is either merely appearances or merely disturbances in the pursuit of knowledge. Even the Demiurge in the Timaeus only makes according to form, not creates according to free will; any contingency that may appear in the products is nothing more than a flaw in the work of manufacture, and has no positive cognitive significance. To know the truth, one can simply conceive directly from the “forms.”

Still, even if the Timaeus may not support the necessity of sense experience, it might be possible to revise it slightly so that it does, without necessarily introducing a capricious God. For example, the Demiurge did indeed create the world according to preexisting forms and matter; yet we know nothing about those original forms (unlike Plato’s imagined confidence in their blueprint), and if we want to know those primordial forms, we can only analyze them by looking at the final product. It is like saying that we cannot see the recipe, but we can drink the beverage that has been produced, so we have no choice but to work from these products—trying them, conjecturing, testing, and mixing them—in order to infer the original recipe that cannot be seen. If the doctrine of creation were revised in this way, then on the one hand it would allow people to continue believing in the existence of ultimate laws, while on the other hand it would compel them to investigate actual things empirically. Such a theory of creation may be closer to the modern scientific worldview than the belief that God is an artist impossible to fathom.

And this is indeed so: the worldview of modern science is, on the one hand, mathematized, and on the other hand generally regarded as “mechanized.” Nature is seen as a machine, and this is also a rather popular understanding of the modern view of nature, yet Foster still does not mention it. In fact, the machine metaphor for nature is closer to a work carefully fabricated by an artisan than to an artwork created freely by a painter. In short, at most one can say that the Greek theology of creation was not yet compatible enough with the modern mechanistic worldview and still required some revision and transformation, but it was not necessarily essential for Christianity to provide a doctrine of creation. Moreover, compared with the Demiurge, this capricious God is not necessarily more harmonious with the world picture of modern science.

 

III. The Four Key Points of Creationism and Their Correspondence to Modern Science

To rescue the proposition that creationism is a prerequisite for the rise of modern science, we need to reexamine the continuity of Christian creationism and the rupture between ancient and modern science. On the one hand, whatever changes may occur in specific theological interpretations, there are after all some continuities and consistencies in the doctrine of creation throughout the entire history of Christianity; if these elements embedded in Christian creationism happen to correspond to the very points at which modern science underwent transformation, then we have good reason to believe that these elements did indeed contribute to the rise of modern science.

Let us first look at the key points of the doctrine of creation. According to McGrath, it includes at least four aspects: “1. There is a clear boundary between God and created beings; 2. Creation means that God’s authority is above the world; 3. It means that creation is good; 4. Human beings are created in the image of God.”[11] And these four points can in turn correspond respectively to several aspects of modern science:

 

1. There is a clear boundary between God and created beings

First, if the world is created, while God is not a creature, then God is absolutely external to the entire world. As Professor Wu Guosheng says, this absolute externality resolves the logical difficulty of the mechanistic view of nature: how can a world of “the greatest magnitude with nothing outside it” be conceived as a machine?

Beyond helping people imagine a clockwork universe model in metaphoric terms, the transition from the Greek view of nature to the mechanistic view of nature also requires a conceptual transition, thereby thoroughly reconstructing the very idea of nature. Without this reconstruction, the mechanistic view of nature would remain a completely absurd concept.

In fact, ancient Greek science originated in the “discovery of nature,” that is, human beings began to ask after the intrinsic “nature—essence” of things, rather than understanding natural things in terms of external interference (divine force or human will). Nature stands opposed to artifice, natural motion to forced motion, natural things to technical artifacts. Aristotle said: “Of things that exist, some exist by nature, and some exist from other causes. … All natural objects clearly have within themselves a principle of motion and rest. By contrast, … artifacts … do not possess such an internal impulse for change.”[12]

A machine, however, is precisely a typical technical artifact; it has no inwardness, and both its source and its purpose lie outside it. Of course, we can also speak of certain properties “of the machine itself,” study its structure and mechanism of operation, but the machine’s “formal cause” has long since already existed in the designer’s mind or on the drawing board; moreover, the formal cause always remains an “appearance,” not truly inside the machine. By contrast, when a seed grows into a great tree, the cause is contained within the seed itself.

Thus a machine represents sheer externality: it has only appearance and no inner substance; the causes of mechanical operation are all external—the designer (formal cause), the maker (efficient cause), and the operator (final cause).

Dexterdijkhuis realized the exteriority that the “mechanical” metaphor necessarily carries with it, and that is also why he believed that in the “mechanization” of the world-picture, the “mechanical” metaphor did not have any important significance. He said: “Science itself has neither a supramundane creator of the universe, nor a goal outside the world that the creator wished to attain through creation; the machine metaphor at most helps to make the atomistic view of nature acceptable to Christian thinkers.”[13] Yet he did not realize that this very “acceptable to Christian thinkers” may be precisely an indispensable link in the “mechanization of the world-picture.” Although this supramundane creator was ultimately driven out by modern science, at the dawn of modern science people did in fact have to pass through this absolute exteriority before they could possibly accept the paradoxical idea of “the mechanization of nature.” The proposition of this paradox itself hints at a major transformation: namely, the boundary that the ancient Greeks had established between the realm of interiority and the realm of exteriority was broken through. If the metaphor that “nature became a machine” is indeed something real, then if no external maker or goal was found in this new world, there is no need to be too surprised, because once the boundary between interiority and exteriority had dissolved, this world of course no longer required an external principle, just as it no longer required an internal principle either.

Dexterdijkhuis said: “If the machine metaphor really provides one essential feature of classical scientific thought, then we may perhaps expect that at least some teleological ideas will occupy an important position in it. Therefore, when studying machines, if one only asks for what cause the motion of one of its parts occurs, without considering the immediate goal to be achieved through this motion, then in terms of ability, we would not regard it as a machine, but only as an arbitrary mechanical system.”[14]

In fact, at the beginning of the rise of modern science, teleological ideas did not lose their standing all at once. Hooyka points out: “Mechanical philosophy also acknowledges final causes, but these final causes are regarded as belonging to another level, and not to the level of physics—the purpose of making a clock cannot explain its operation… A machine can find its reason for being in the plan of its creator and outside itself, whereas a living organism implies an internal final cause, namely the maintenance of individual life.”[15]

The earliest modern scientists did not exclude teleological ideas; rather, they placed them on a different level. Since God assumed all the exteriority in the mechanistic worldview, the external purpose or external motive of the world machine, along with the question of the world’s operating mechanism, was henceforth divided by the “clear boundary between God and creatures”: the latter belonged to the level of physics, while the former belonged to the level of theology.

Modern science, by introducing and ultimately discarding the concept of God, completed an ideational revolution that cut off the roots at the base: God, together with the purpose of the world, was severed from the domain of science. The modern world, stripped of God, has neither hidden content nor external purpose, and only form or structure remains.

Of course, the “master builder God” can also, to some extent, play the role of this absolute exteriority, but only insofar as “maker” is concerned; the design and operation of the world, however, are not the task of the master builder God. In other words, he is unable to bear and carry away final causes. By contrast, the all-powerful Christian God is at once the designer, maker, and operator of the universe, and even the provider of matter itself (material cause). Aristotle’s four causes all perished along with God. What remains in the mechanical world, and can still be asked about by modern science, is not the efficient cause or formal cause in Aristotle’s sense, but rather something that could never possibly be asked after in Aristotle—“the internal cause of mechanism.”

 

2. Creation Means That God’s Authority Is Higher Than the World

God’s authority being higher than the world means that God’s creation does not need to rely on any higher law; on the contrary, God establishes the laws for the world. So-called “authority” is not sheer arbitrary play, but governing the order of the world through legislation. God is the “Lord,” the covenant-maker, and the Bible is precisely the double covenant between God and human beings, with the books of the Law as its very foundation. The Christian God is not a capricious and fickle tyrant, but a sovereign who speaks of law. Therefore, although God’s creation of the world is free, it is also rational. In theory, the omnipotent God can do anything at any time, but Christians also believe that God keeps promises and observes the law.

This corresponds to the experimental element in modern science, as already discussed earlier. That is to say, God established laws that nature must obey (natural laws), but the design of these rules was not decided according to any necessary rational principle, but according to free will. Since human beings cannot directly grasp God’s will, they can only indirectly infer the order of the world through empirical study.

But earlier discussion has also already hinted at some suspicious aspects of this correspondence. On the one hand, the necessity of empirical inquiry seems also to be derivable from other forms of creationism, such as that of the master builder God; on the other hand, the necessity of empirical inquiry may not necessarily be the mark separating ancient science from modern science.

Writers such as Foster seem to overemphasize the empiricism of modern science, while regarding Greek science as too simple. In Foster’s view, “The whole character of Greek natural science is derived from the assumption that the essence of natural objects, like the essence of geometrical objects, is definable.”[16]

But we know that modern science brought about a certain “mathematization of nature”; that is to say, mathematical language became the essence of nature. In the popular images of the time, God created the world with compass and straightedge in hand. According to Galileo, God wrote the “book of nature” in mathematical language. The feature Foster describes—“the essence of natural objects, like the essence of geometrical objects, is definable”—isn’t that precisely a characteristic of modern science? How could it be assigned to Greek science instead?

Then in Greek science, are essences definable? Quite the opposite. Socrates argued with people in the streets, and the final outcome always revealed the invalidity of “definition.” Plato envisioned the “world of Ideas,” while the mathematical world stood one level below; things that can be clearly defined—and therefore can be copied and imitated—are even lower than the mathematical world, at most the wisdom of craftsmen, and are nowhere near the world of Ideas. In Plato, knowledge of mathematical objects is also obtained through ecstasy and recollection, not through definition; definition at most can only serve as a means of provoking intuition and stimulating recollection. As for Aristotle, he was even less likely to say that knowledge comes through definition. Knowability and definability were not the same thing for the Greeks.

Foster believes that the Greeks divided nature into form and matter, the former knowable and the latter perceptible, but the latter is not helpful to knowledge and is merely an obstacle to cognition.[17] Broadly speaking, to say that the Greeks valued reason over experience may be correct. But upon closer examination it is not that simple. In fact, in Aristotelian philosophy, both the perceptible and the knowable belong to form, while “matter” only represents potentiality and does not include actual properties; accordingly, it is neither perceptible nor knowable. At least in Aristotle, the accumulation of sensory experience did indeed have positive significance for knowledge, though perhaps it could not reach the highest level of knowledge (theological or metaphysical). Yet in the system of modern science, knowledge is still stratified; even the activities of what are regarded as the most basic mathematical knowledge or the “formal sciences” are still considered (though mistakenly) to be purely rational, not dependent on empirical accumulation and not requiring experimentation. Centered on mathematics and theoretical physics, the more a discipline lies at the “margin” of the modern system of knowledge, the more it depends on experience. Compared with Aristotle’s system of knowledge, this situation is not all that different.

However, the modern system of knowledge and Aristotle’s system of knowledge do after all still have some major differences, and this lies in the fact that the modern scientific system is reductionist: while core and peripheral disciplines are increasingly differentiated institutionally, they are ontologically unified. That is to say, the mathematical symbols that theoretical physics deduces conceptually, and the actual phenomena grasped by experimental science through experience, point to the same beings. This unity, or rather this flattening of the field of beings, is a feature that distinguishes modern science from ancient Greek science. Although ancient Greek science also contained both deductive and empirical methods of inquiry, the world of Ideas and the real world are not identical; the real circle is a copy of the ideal circle. Even if the practice of drawing real circles helps one learn knowledge about the ideal circle, theoretical knowledge and empirical knowledge are still in the end directed toward the same beings.

Therefore, Plato could accept a qualitative description of planetary orbits, whereas Kepler could not accept an eight-minute discrepancy between theoretical deduction and empirical observation.

Earlier writers have noticed this change and its possible relation to the Christian doctrine of creation: “For a Platonist, if there is a line in nature that is not quite circular, that is because nature is only a rather unsuccessful imitation of geometric Ideas. But the Christian believer sees it differently: if God wants a line to be circular, then he will make it so. If he wants it not to be circular, then it may be a precise ellipse.”[18]

For the Greeks, Ideas were either tools for studying the real world, or prototypes that the real world imitates. In any case, there is no reason for Ideas and reality to maintain exact correspondence. For Christians, however, God’s Word and the real world are one and the same thing; the real world ought to obey the laws established by God to the very letter.

Of course, according to certain heterodox Christian interpretations (for example, Gnosticism), the real world can also be interpreted as some kind of product of fallenness, having strayed from the original will, but after all, such readings never occupied the mainstream.

In Chinese philosophy, the “fa” in “人法地、地法天” usually also means “to follow the example of,” though it does carry a sense of obedience; still, it does not include the meaning of natural law. As for the concept of law in Western science, although its origins are by no means simple, it is hard to say that it has nothing to do with Christianity.

 

 

3. Creation Means That Creatures Are Good

In Genesis, almost every act of creation is followed by the phrase “God saw that it was good.” Clearly, the Christian God holds a positive attitude toward his works. Therefore, Christians are more inclined to believe that studying creation will help people appreciate God’s greatness and benevolence; most scientists during the Scientific Revolution regarded this as a source of honor, which goes without saying. This sense of honor perhaps fostered a free spirit of scientific inquiry.

Of course, ancient Greek science already possessed the strongest non-utilitarian character: scholars pursued learning entirely out of the desire for knowledge, not from practical gain. Yet the freedom of ancient Greek science is precisely something one feels only in pure theoretical inquiry that transcends specific material things; what inner pleasure could there be in empirical study of a mortal, defective, filthy material world? But modern Christian scientists did not need to confine their research goals to purely ideal existence; rather, when studying concrete things in the real world, they could already obtain intrinsic meaning—empirical inquiry itself, observation of creation itself, irrespective of the actual results of the study, is praise of God, and therefore meaningful.

This Christian contribution was achieved by correcting the Greek spirit; the material world, which had been extremely devalued in Greek science, was restored to honor, while the spirit of free inquiry could still continue.

4. Human Beings Are Created in the Image of God

This last point is especially important. Human beings are, on the one hand, created beings, but at the same time they are also the most special kind of created being; that is to say, in a certain sense, human beings partake of a bit of divinity. Human beings are in the position of “under one God, above all things”; they are the governors of all things and the center of the world. This idea leads to a certain anthropocentric arrogance, arbitrarily interrogating, exploiting, and controlling nature. Of course, this is not the inevitable result of Christian doctrine; in fact, it is precisely the first sin, “pride.” But it cannot be denied that Christianity bears a certain responsibility for modern anthropocentrism.

On the other hand, the similarity between human beings and God implies, in a certain sense, the intelligibility of the cosmos as a whole. Since human beings are similar to God, then human free will is God’s free will, and human perception is God’s perception; the difference lies only in the fact that the former is finite and the latter infinite. But in any case, human beings can indeed control nature and perceive nature as God does.

When Newton called space “the organ of sensation of God,” it was not merely a metaphor; it hinted at the way modern science understood the world. Newton said this: “If we could know how we move our limbs, then we could understand how God makes a space impenetrable and gives it the form of a body. ‘It is quite evident that God created this world by the exercise of his will, in the same way that we move our bodies solely by an act of will.’ Hence, ‘the likeness between our capacities and divine power is greater than philosophers imagine: the Bible says that we are all created according to the image of God.’”[19]

From a modern scientific perspective, it is not so much human-centered as God-centered. “God” provides an absolutely objective, global, universal, and fully controllable perspective; this “God’s eye view” is precisely one of the most important presuppositions of modern science,