The Birth of Science in the Christian High Middle Ages and What It Means Today.

The scientific quest found fertile soil only when this faith in a personal, rational Creator had truly permeated a whole culture, beginning with the centuries of the High Middle Ages. It was that faith which provided, in sufficient measure, confidence in the rationality of the universe, trust in progress, and appreciation of the quantitative method, all indispensable ingredients of the scientific quest. . . .
The future of man rests with that judgment which holds the universe to be the handiwork of a Creator and Lawgiver. To this belief, science owes its very birth and life.

-Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1974)

Jaki, a scientist, philospher and priest has pointed out how science was stillborn in many other societies. For example, science failed in Mesopotamian cultures, a number of American cultures, India, China, Egypt, Greece and Arabia. All made significant advances but had science stillborn at various stages of gestation. The radical difference was Christian metaphysics, which rejected a cyclical view of history, astrological and other essentially pseudo-scientific explanations for natural phenomena, deification of nature, denial of the existence or orderliness of the universe, the view of nature as an organism, lack of balance between faith and reason, and mankind as a part of nature.

C.S. Lewis expressed a similar concept this way,"Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator." According to Alvin Plantinga, the Notre Dame philosopher, "Modern science was conceived, and born, and flourished in the matrix of Christian theism. Only liberal doses of self-deception and double-think, I believe, will permit it to flourish in the context of Darwinian naturalism." By Darwinian naturalism, I believe Plantinga is not referring to mere acceptance of the idea that evolution is valid, but the reductionist and materialist view that everything should be addressed and explained exclusively in terms of the natural world and that the Legislator of Whom Lewis speaks of does not exist.

This pure naturalist view in science has a tendency to degrade into barbarism. This is apparent from the increasing bioethical quandries we are seeing. Such barbarisms as infanticide are advocated by the likes of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. In Holland, eight percent of babies who die are killed by a physician. The California and Hawaii legislatures are considering euthansia bills like the one in Oregon (NRLC: Euthansia). Hand in hand with this view and abetting it is the attack in the political and legal realm on the natural law concept, notably found in the American Declaration of Independence, that rights are endowed by our Creator.

Could it not be more apparent that Jaki was dead on in saying our future "rests with that judgment which holds the universe to be the handiwork of a Creator and Lawgiver."