On the relationship between science and religion, if one were to say that the two are irreconcilable, then the focal point of the conflict often lies in Christianity’s doctrine of creation, where Christian teachings about the universe or nature come into direct collision with natural science. Conversely, if one were to say that science and religion complement and support one another, one would still have to begin from creation theory.
In 1934 Michael Foster wrote the article “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” attempting to reduce Christianity’s doctrine of creation to a necessary condition for the rise of modern natural science, and offering a highly representative way of integrating creation theory and natural science.
Foster’s line of thought is actually quite simple, and Ian Barbour summed up its gist with precision:
“…it claims that the biblical doctrine of creation made a unique contribution to the rise of experimental science because it combined the notions of rationality and contingency. If God is rational, then the world is orderly. But if God is also free, then the world need not necessarily have the particular order it now has. We can therefore understand the world only through observation, not by trying, as the Greeks did, to deduce its order from necessary first principles. The Church Fathers thought that God, out of free will, created matter and form out of nothing, rather than simply imposing preexisting eternal forms upon matter.”[1]
Broadly speaking, this argument is not bad, but on closer inspection it will give rise to many problems, involving both the interpretation of Christian doctrine and the understanding of the history of science. Although as a conclusion I too concede that Christianity’s doctrine of creation is indeed greatly related to the rise of modern science, the specific steps in Foster’s argument are open to question.
Let us begin with the title. What exactly is the “Christian doctrine of creation”? Foster puts it simply: it is nothing more than the claim that God is a creator with free will, rather than the Demiurge in the Timaeus, who shapes the world on the basis of preexisting forms and matter. But it must be noted that Christian theological theory itself also developed and changed over time. For example, this concept of the “artisan Demiurge” is in fact precisely the Gnostic understanding, and although Gnosticism was heretical, it was nevertheless one way of understanding Christian doctrine. As for orthodox theological interpretation, from the patristic period to the Middle Ages, then to the Reformation and even to the present, it too has undergone many changes, and the creator’s “free will” has not always been emphasized in this way.
Xu Zhiyu, in Introduction to Christian Theology, particularly notes: “Modern and early modern Christian theology, along with the currents of modernity, overemphasized God’s creative free will 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 perspective of theological development, this explains why in modern Christian theology the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of redemption came to be separated.”[2]
That is to say, the situation may well be this: the kind of creation theory Foster discusses, which especially stresses free will, is precisely a consequence of modernity, rather than one of its causes. Was it because creation theory prompted the rise of modern science, or because the rise of modern science and the accompanying entire process of modernization ultimately made a particular understanding of creation come to dominate? The causal connection here is not clear.
Second, the “rise of modern science” in the title is also worth examining. In his citation, Barbour changes it to the “rise of experimental science,” which is obviously much more accurate. But when we speak of the rise of modern science, we usually trace it back to the revolution in astronomy and natural philosophy (closer to “theoretical physics”) from Copernicus to Newton, whereas within that revolution the empirical tradition of experimental science had not yet fully unfolded. The “modern science” Foster speaks of between the lines is rather “modern philosophy”; he begins from the traditions of rationalism and empiricism, mentioning Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and even Kant, while saying nothing at all about Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, or even Newton. Leaving aside whether Foster’s interpretation of these philosophers is accurate, the key point is that to talk about “experimental science” on the basis of these philosophers’ ideas is already insufficient; whether they can represent the characteristics of “modern science” is even more doubtful.
So 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 even if we discover that the later unfolding of the experimental scientific tradition coincides with the Christian doctrine of creation, the more reasonable explanation may be that the rise of modern science simultaneously spurred changes in Christian theology rather than the rise of experimental science, but it was not necessarily the doctrine of creation that played the dominant role.
Of course, whether the dominant thread in the rise of modern science is indeed this mathematical thread of astronomy and physics is itself a matter of considerable debate in the history of science. For example, chemist[3] scholars argue that the thread from “alchemy to chemistry” is at least equally important, and that the alchemical tradition can be seen as the seedbed of experimental science; other scholars point out that the technical environment and craft traditions widely present in medieval Western Europe—windmills, watermills, mechanical clocks, and so on—promoted attention to empirical investigation; moreover, the rise of printing also made it possible for empirical observations to be properly recorded and publicly circulated, thereby making accumulation of experience possible and also promoting people’s interest in collecting records of observation and empirical knowledge[4]… In short, there are still many threads in the history of science that seem to have no direct connection with Christianity’s doctrine of creation.
But history is always tangled and cannot be repeated, making it difficult to discern definite causal connections in it. Starting from the internal logic of intellectual history, we can in fact re-derive certain narratives of prior causes and later effects, and this kind of causality in the sense of intellectual history need not necessarily match the chronological order of objective history. For example, Petrarch certainly came before Gutenberg, but if humanism had not had the aid of printing, it would probably have been hard for it to become an irresistible spirit of the age; once the Renaissance had already been established, it was natural to retrospectively recognize its precursors, which were certainly earlier than printing, but without printing Petrarch and others would not necessarily have been granted epoch-making significance. We can still say that printing was one major cause 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 Christianity’s doctrine of creation indeed laid the logical groundwork for experimental science, then it is not wrong to say that creation theory was one cause of modern science. Besides, Foster’s title speaks of “and,” with its aim being to sort out the relationship and entanglement between the two; as for the final conclusion, it is not the most important thing. Therefore, to comprehensively evaluate Foster’s claim, one still needs to probe more deeply into the details.
First, Foster offers two assumptions that he seems to take for granted (P447): on the one hand, “before modern natural science was actually established, early modern philosophers ascribed certain characteristics to nature, making it a possible object of modern natural science”; on the other hand, “these modern beliefs about nature… are incompatible with the Aristotelian tenets upheld by scholastic philosophy.”
These two assumptions are not self-evident. On the one hand, as noted above, Foster places modern philosophy before modern science. Of course, there is no very definite standard for where to locate the “actual establishment” of modern science—whether in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century. But even if one pushes this periodization later, one cannot deny that the natural philosophy from Copernicus to Galileo had already begun to reveal its incompatibility with Aristotle, and can hardly still be included within the category of “scholastic philosophy.” If, in Galileo, “modern natural science” was at least beginning to emerge, then these changes may not easily be placed after “modern philosophy.” In fact, philosophy is often the owl that takes flight only at dusk, and may not necessarily be able to run ahead of science. In any case, this order of precedence is by no means so unquestionable.
In addition, Foster seems to regard “nature” as a ready-made object, with only the ancients and the moderns differing over its characteristics. Yet the transformation of the idea of nature goes far beyond this. For nature to become an “object” is itself a modern condition. In a certain sense this objectification of nature does depend on Christianity (the intentionality of the “eye of God”), but Foster of course does not discuss it from that angle. Instead, he treats the concept of nature—and also key concepts such as reason, experience, form, matter, and so on—as if they were already fixed and given, without attending to the shift in meaning they had already undergone in ancient and modern contexts, thereby making much of his discussion superficial; we will return to this point later.
On the other hand, Foster takes Aristotle’s philosophical tenets to be the orthodoxy of medieval scholastic philosophy, which is also worth questioning. In fact, early medieval scholarship declined, and Greek science nearly disappeared in Latin Western Europe, surviving only in the Arabic world; by the time Europeans rediscovered Aristotle, they did not always venerate him as an authority, but often condemned him instead, so Aristotle’s philosophy can hardly be said to have been “maintained.” Neither in ancient Greece nor in the Middle Ages was the scholarly tradition monolithic. Although Foster notices certain differences between Plato and Aristotle, he still speaks in broad terms of Greek science, and then immediately asks about the source of these “non-Greek elements” that were supposedly “incompatible” with ancient science. Yet within classical science, Aristotle and Plato, the atomists, Ptolemy, and Archimedes all had their own points of mutual incompatibility. If modern science does indeed contain elements contrary to Aristotelianism, perhaps these came from other sources or variants within the Greek tradition, rather than from “modern tenets.” In particular, if one considers that the rise of early modern science was accompanied precisely by the Renaissance rediscovery of classical learning and by the revival of Platonism, then the above doubts become even harder to dismiss as mere quibbling.
Foster not only treats “Greek” as monolithic, but also sweeps all that is “non-Greek” under the heading of Christianity. He writes: “The non-Greek element in modern and medieval philosophy has the same source, namely Christian revelation… To deny this we must suppose that the non-Greek element in modern philosophy has no source and that the non-Greek element in medieval philosophy has no result.” (P448)
But this is clearly not “obvious.” Although we can indeed broadly trace Western modern civilization to the convergence of the two streams of “dual-Hellenic civilization,” namely the Greek tradition and the Christian tradition, it is obviously not as simple as 1+1. In the development of Europe from the Middle Ages to modernity, the influences were by no means limited to Christianity alone. Including Germanic inheritance, Islamic culture, the rediscovery of ancient Rome, commodities and technological inventions from China, and the geographic discoveries, all played不可忽视 a role in the final formation of Western modern culture, and do all these non-Greek, non-Christian influences really have no beginning and no end, and no result whatsoever? Even if one says that Christian culture ultimately occupied the core position, to attribute the “increment” of modern science entirely to Christianity is by no means beyond dispute.
Leaving aside for now whether Foster is overly partial to Christianity in tracing the sources of these “increments,” let us look at what Foster thought the differences were between modern science and Greek science. Foster gives two examples (P447): Descartes or modern physics both deny the role of final cause (teleology) in nature, while Locke or modern empirical science both assert that the true essence of natural objects is unknowable.
On the other hand, in Foster’s view, “the entire character of Greek natural science is derived from the following assumption: namely, that the essence of natural objects, like the essence of geometrical objects, is definable.” (P454)
As for these differences between modern science and Greek science, Foster believes that, at bottom, they amount to whether one accepts Christianity’s doctrine of creation: “The chief difference between ancient methods and the methods of modern natural science may perhaps be reduced to this: whether these methods are appropriate to the study of a created nature.” (P453)
So Foster’s argument includes two links that need to be examined: first, whether Foster’s summary of the distinctive characteristics of Greek science and modern science is appropriate; second, whether it is reasonable to say that these distinctive characteristics correspond to the doctrine of creation.
First, to say that Greek science regarded essence as “knowable,” while modern science regards essence as “unknowable,” is highly problematic. Although philosophers such as Locke and Kant did hold that essence was “unknowable,” philosophy has always consisted of many schools. Since there are agnostics, there are of course also cognitivists. Are these few agnostics, selected according to the author’s needs, sufficient to represent modern philosophy, let alone the characteristics of modern science? In addition, according to a rather common interpretation, modern science brought about a certain “mathematization of nature,” that is, mathematical language became the essence of nature. In the popular imagery of the time, God created the world with compass and straightedge, and the “book of nature” was written in mathematical language. Although Foster’s article was written in 1934, this classic notion of the “book of nature” should not be ignored; even if one wanted to take a different route, it should not be entirely avoided. Is the characteristic Foster describes—“the essence of natural objects is definable like that of geometrical objects”—not precisely a feature of modern science? How, then, has it been assigned to Greek science instead?
So, in Greek science, is essence definable? It is precisely not. Socrates’ debates with people in the streets always end up revealing the futility of “definition.” Plato envisions the “world of Forms,” while the mathematical world is already one level lower; things that can be clearly defined—and thus are reproducible and imitable—are even lower than the mathematical world, at most the wisdom of craftsmen, and nowhere near the world of Forms. For Plato, knowledge of mathematical objects also comes through trance and recollection, not through definition; definition at best is merely a means of provoking intuition and stimulating recollection. As for Aristotle, he certainly would not say that knowledge comes through definition either. Knowability and definability are not the same thing for the Greeks.
Foster believes that the Greeks divided nature into two parts, form and matter: the former is knowable, while the latter is perceptible, but the latter is of no use for knowledge and is merely an obstacle to cognition. (P455) Broadly speaking, to say that the Greeks valued reason over experience is perhaps not wrong. But on closer examination, matters are not so simple. In fact, in Aristotelian philosophy, both the perceptible and the intelligible belong to form, while “matter” merely represents potentiality and does not contain actual properties, and is thus neither perceptible nor intelligible. At least in Aristotle, the accumulation of sensory experience does indeed have a positive significance for knowledge, though perhaps it does not reach the highest level of knowledge (theological or metaphysical). Yet within the system of modern science, various kinds of knowledge are still hierarchically differentiated, and the mathematical knowledge or activity of the so-called “formal sciences,” which are considered most basic, are still regarded as purely rational (albeit mistakenly so), not dependent on the accumulation of experience and not requiring experiments. Centering on mathematics and theoretical physics, the more “peripheral” a discipline is within the modern system of knowledge, the more it relies on experience; compared with Aristotle’s system of knowledge, this situation is not all that different.
Since Foster’s summary of the distinct characteristics of ancient and modern science is highly questionable, the effort to connect them to the doctrine of creation loses much of its persuasiveness. Still, Foster’s insight does have something to recommend it. He notices that Greek theological concepts—whether polytheism, pantheism, or the doctrines of Plato or Aristotle—could not provide sensory experience with a solid epistemological status. What is obtained from sensory experience is either merely appearance or simply an interference with knowledge. Even the artisan Demiurge of the Timaeus creates only according to form, not according to free will, and any contingency that may appear in the product is nothing more than a flaw in the work of making, without any positive cognitive significance. To know the truth, one can simply think directly from the “forms.”
However, even if the Timaeus may not support the necessity of sensory experience, with a little revision it might meet the requirements; there is no need to introduce an arbitrary God. For example, the artisan Demiurge did indeed create the world according to preexisting forms and matter, yet we know nothing of those original forms (unlike what Plato imagined, where their formula was known with certainty), and if we want to learn those primordial forms, we can only begin from the final product and analyze it. It is like when we cannot see the recipe sheet, but can drink the drink ultimately produced; then we have no choice but to try, speculate, test, and mix on the basis of these products, in order to grasp that invisible original recipe sheet. If this were a slightly adjusted doctrine of creation, then on the one hand it could allow people to continue believing in the existence of ultimate laws, while on the other hand it would compel them to undertake empirical investigation of real things. Such a theory of creation may in fact be closer to the worldview of modern science than believing that God is an elusive artist.
This is indeed the case. On the one hand, the worldview of modern science is mathematized; on the other hand, it is generally considered “mechanized.” Nature is seen as a machine, and this is also a rather popular understanding of the modern view of nature, yet Foster says nothing about it. In fact, the machine metaphor for nature is closer to a work produced step by step by a craftsman than to an artwork created at the whim of a painter. In short, at most one can say that the Greek theology of creation was still not sufficiently compatible with the modern mechanistic worldview and needed some revision and transformation, but it was not necessarily the case that Christianity had to provide a doctrine of creation. Moreover, compared with the artisan Demiurge, this arbitrary God may not be any more harmonious with the world-picture of modern science.
Of course, there are many specific argumentative steps in Foster’s text that I have omitted, and among them there are no lack of insights. But because there are deviations at some crucial junctures, his overall discussion is hard to find convincing.
References:
M. B. Foster, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science, Mind, New Series, Vol. 43, No. 172 (Oct., 1934), Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association, pp. 446-468
“Science vs. Religion: A Question That Cannot Be Simplified—An Interview with Dr. Su Xiangui of the Department of Philosophy, Peking University”http://www.zhanlu.org.cn/eastday/kl/kxtm/kxjs/u1a307425.html
[1] Ian Barbour: When Science Meets Religion, translated by Su Xiangui, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2004, p. 55.
[2] Xu Zhiwei: Introduction to Christian Theology, China Social Sciences Press, 2001, p. 53.
[3] For example, “Science and History—An Evaluation from the Perspective of a Chemist”
[4] See “Printing, Natural History, and the Birth of Modern Science”; also consult Eisenstein: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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