You might be thinking that the life and influence of Jesus have little relevance to science. As a 1st-century Galilean, of course, he had nothing direct to say about the study of the natural world. But I think it is arguable that Jesus had a massive indirect influence on the development of science.

Put simply, it’s widely acknowledged that the Judeo-Christian way of thinking about the world provided the conditions, the necessary conditions, for the passionate study of the natural world, and therefore what would become a science. And Jesus is the reason the Judeo-Christian worldview became the dominant view in the West.

There are three conditions that have to be in place to provide the best soil out of which natural science could grow. And Jesus taught all three, and his followers took these notions wherever they went in the world.

First, the creation must be viewed as orderly, rational, imbued with wisdom and elegance. That’s not the pagan view. Pagan religion from Babylonia to Egypt to Gaul to England in Antiquity insisted on a capricious, unruly world. And that makes science unthinkable. Science depends on mathematical elegance and rational order built into the structure of the physical universe.

To be clear there were pagan exceptions. The high philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and so on, all had moved toward an intellectual conviction that there was one reality, one great mind behind the universe, and so the physical universe was to them rationally explicable. We can easily accept that these philosophers, especially someone like Aristotle, were beginning to study the natural world as a rational pursuit. Now, my point is that the Jews had already believed this, and operated on this assumption for centuries before the great Greek philosophers, and it was this Jewish view that Jesus passed on to his disciples, and his disciples passed on to the pagan world.

But there is another condition that fostered the scientific project, and this was less obvious even among the great Greek minds. It’s the belief that the world is not only rational, and therefore explicable, but it’s also profoundly good, beautiful, a work of art. It is widely acknowledged in the literature of the history of science that all of the first scientists, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and so on, saw their scientific work as worship. Because a good God had produced a good creation, the study of that creation was an act of devotion.

You may remember way back in episode 9 of Undeceptions we interviewed Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, a historian of modern science. It was her study of the very first scientists of the modern era that began to lead her out of atheism toward Christianity. She couldn’t get past the fact that these great intellects at the foundation of modern science all thought they were doing something worshipful. Their science was inspired by their faith. And there can be no doubt that Jesus was indirectly responsible for inspiring countless millions of people to love the good creation, as a gift of a father who makes the sun shine on the righteous and the unrighteous, as He said, who decks out the lilies of the field in their splendour.

There is a third condition that inspired modern science, and this has been argued forcefully by the historian of science Peter Harrison, who was a Professor at Oxford and now at the University of Queensland. In order for modern science to take off people had to believe that they themselves were fallen, fragile, and prone to rational self-deception. Why? Because if we trust our rational capacities too much we’ll be content merely to observe the world and make rational judgments about why things are the way they are. We won’t stop to test our rational thoughts.

This is what prevented ancient Greek science from going too far down the road toward empirical science. The Greeks firmly believed that the logos, or rationality in the universe, was the same logos that was in their brains. We have the capacity rationally to intuit why things are the way they are. This led to all sorts of crazy, but rational, speculations about the world. An example Edwin Judge, the famous Australian Classical Historian, gives is of the Greek view, the very logical Greek view that male semen was produced in the brain. For the obvious reason that the brain (which they had observed) was the only internal material in the body that was the same colour as semen.

The Greeks did loads of this sort of pure rationalising. They backed themselves and their intellectual prowess, their ability to rationalise the world. But what really got modern science going was a belief, inspired by Christianity and Augustinian theology in particular, that even our minds are corrupted by sin. Peter Harrison points out that there was a great revival of Augustinian thought In the Middle Ages. Augustine of Hippo had really just systematised the teaching of Jesus, that every one of us is evil, to use a word he often employed in the gospels. “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts,” Jesus said, “how much more will your father give good gifts”.

Harrison has shown how this idea really began to trouble the intellectuals of the Middle Ages. They’d made so much progress in rational philosophy, they’d studied the ancient classical literature, they’d codified logic, rhetoric, observational astronomy, and much more. But they began to fear that all their speculations could be flawed given they were descendants of fallen Adam.

The solution was to test their rational theories about the world. Only real-world testing could compensate for our propensity to get things wrong. And so was born the experiment. You’ll have to read Harrison’s book, ‘The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science’, to get the details, but it is pretty clear that this is how early modern scientists expressed their empirical work.

So, it’s true that Jesus didn’t talk about science directly. But his indirect gift to the world, quite apart from his death and resurrection for our eternal forgiveness, was a worldview marked by a belief in the rationality of the universe, a conviction about the goodness of creation, and a realism about the limits of our rational abilities.

By John Dickson

Want to hear the rest of the episode?
Check out episode 88: “Beautiful Science”