Faith and the Genesis of Modern Science

Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and the other founders of modern science were all believers in the truths of the opening chapter in the Hebrew Bible.  The belief implicit in Genesis, that nature was created by a law-giving God and so must be governed by "laws of nature," played a necessary role in the emergence of modern science in 17th-century Europe.  Equally necessary was the belief that human beings are made in the image of God and, as a consequence, can understand these laws of nature.

The ancient Greeks certainly believed that nature was intelligible and that its regularities could be made explicit.  But Greek gods such as Zeus were not understood to have created the processes of nature; therefore, they could not have given the laws governing these processes.  Aristotle did not use the concept of law in relation to nature.  Neither did the Epicureans, such as Democritus and Lucretius, who instead advocated natural and causal explanations of natural phenomena.  The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy notes that "nothing closely resembling the modern . . . idea of a law of nature emerged in the ancient world.  Despite the immense variety of theories worked out during more than a millennium of philosophical speculation, no one arrived at a position at all similar to the characteristic seventeenth-century blend of . . . theology and a mechanistic . . . physics."