A seminar On, SCIENCE & RELIGION

Topic: Christians contributions to Modern Science : John Houghton, Francis Bacon, and John Ray

Submitted to: Rev. Sam T George

Submitted by: Sony RL ( BD3 )

Introduction

It is often assumed that the relationship between Christianity and science has been a long and troubled one.
Such assumptions draw support from a variety of sources.

There are contemporary controversies about evolution and creation, for example, which are thought to
typify past relations between science and religion. This view is reinforced by popular accounts of such historical
episodes as the Condemnation of Galileo, which saw the Catholic Church censure Galileo for teaching that the earth
revolved around the sun.

In spite of this widespread view on the historical relations between science and religion, historians of science
have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of
modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere
religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by
religious assumptions. In this seminar my aim is find out the Christian contribution to science and religion.

1. Modern Science.

Modern science is a way of examining an event or a particular aspect of creation and making a
comprehensive study of the item in question so that it can be predictably categorized and, if it is a process, it can be
modeled mathematically. This is called the scientific method, and it should reveal some answers to questions and
produce more questions as well. While science is generally thought to have begun with Aristotle and Hippocrates, it
is Galileo Galilei who is considered modern science’s father and Sir Isaac Newton who completely revolutionized the
methodology.

What the founders of modern science were concerned about was this idea of the knowledge of nature, a
problem that Aristotle recognized and the medieval university recognized in the problem of universals: How can we
have a universal, necessary, and certain knowledge of nature if our only access to nature is experience, and
experience is particular, concrete, and continually changing? That becomes an explicit and self-conscious issue that
the founders of modern science wrestled with even as they insisted that it was possible to know nature,
understanding now that it was what was behind experience. This could not have emerged without the recognition
that they were building on what their predecessors had done.1

Science is more about the process of learning, understanding, synthesizing, revising, and repeating the
process over and over again, for a better understanding of the world. But there are things that won’t likely change
and will be true forever. For example, gravity pulls things downward, improved sanitation reduces diseases, and
planes do fly. Good scientists are constantly open to new data and willing to change their views when new
observations are encountered.2

2. Christianity and Modern science

Methodological naturalism is a convention that has been around really only since the late 19th century.
Science actually got started in a very explicitly theistic—indeed Christian—milieu. The period of time that historians
call the Scientific Revolution is roughly 1300 to 1700. There's debate about when it actually started and how much
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the Protestants versus Catholics were responsible, but clearly theological ideas—Christian theological ideas—had a
huge in the formation and foundation of modern science.

One of those key ideas was the idea of intelligibility: that nature is intelligible. There's an order and design
that can be understood and discerned by the scientist because nature is the product of a rational mind, namely the
mind of God, and that that same mind or creator who made nature with that rational order built into it made us and
our reason, so that we could perceive and understand the reason that he built into nature. That was what gave
people confidence to do the hard work of investigation to figure out the hidden order, the design that is beneath the
appearances of natural phenomenon.

The first thing to say is that science did not arise because of a set of naturalistic presuppositions. It actually
arose because of a conviction that there was a lawful order in nature, that human beings could discern and
understand it because they'd been made in the image of the creator of that order, and that also they needed to go
investigate. While they might expect that there's a rational order there (the Greeks believe the same), they also
knew the rational order was contingent on the choice of the creator. This was a product of recovering the doctrine of
creation in the late Middle Ages. Since the order in nature is contingent on the act of the Creator, we have to go and
look and see what kind of order he put into it. We can't just simply sit in our armchairs and deduce it from logical
first principles.

The Greeks and ptolemaic astronomy were a good example of this. They figured that since the most perfect
form of motion is a circle, and since the planets are in a heavenly realm, they must be inscribing circular orbits. But,
in fact, they were doing ellipses. So the early modern scientists broke with the ancient Greeks and said since nature
is created by God and he could have done otherwise, we need to go and find out not what he must have done, as
Robert Boyle said, but what he did do—which means empirical investigation. You've got to look and see. There were
a number of ways in which Christianity gave rise to modern science, and the idea that a set of naturalistic
assumptions is necessary to do science is just historically false.3

3. Christian contributors to Modern science

John Houghton is considered one of the most outstanding and effective environmental scientists of his
generation. The best examples of Sir John’s work include his key role in the development of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a still unique relationship between political policy and scientific rigour, where he
led or co-led the Science Working Group of IPCC from 1988 until 2002; his advisory role with the UK Prime Minister;
and his establishment of the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, now regarded as a world
centre of scientific excellence.

Houghton was also the director general and chief executive of the UK Meteorological Office from 1983 to
1991 and established the organisation’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services, which is now one of the
world’s foremost research bodies on climate science. His work on climate research began in the 1960s when the
focus, amid the Cold War, was on studying potential changes in the atmosphere in the event of nuclear fallout. At
the University of Oxford, he conducted research into the temperature structure and composition of the atmosphere
using Nasa’s Nimbus satellites.

He became chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, a position he held
until 2002 and during which he was the lead editor of the first three IPCC reports. This work was a major factor in the
award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC in 2007, which was shared with former US vice-president Al Gore. John
himself was one of the team who received the prize on behalf of the IPPC.

Sir John founded the world-renowned Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services where he was also an
honorary scientist from 2002. He was also an honorary scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory from 1991, a

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trustee of the Shell Foundation from 2000 and chairman of the John Ray Initiative from 1997 until his death. As one
of the principal climate scientists of his generation, he contributed significantly to the understanding of the causes
and impacts of global warming, convinced many politicians about the gravity of its risk and, as a Christian, in his later
years undertook to persuade American evangelist preachers that humans are able to influence the Earth’s climate.4

3.2. Fransis Bacon

Bacon begins with a distinction of three faculties—memory, imagination, and reason—to which are
respectively assigned history, “poesy,” and philosophy. History has an inclusive sense and means all knowledge of
singular, individual matters of fact. “Poesy” is “feigned history” and not taken to be cognitive at all and so really
irrelevant. After subdividing poesy perfunctorily into narrative, representative (or dramatic), and allusive (or
parabolical) forms, Bacon gives it no further consideration.

History is divided into natural and civil, the civil category also including ecclesiastical and literary history
(which for Bacon is really the history of ideas). History supplies the raw material for philosophy, in other words for
the general knowledge that is inductively derived from it. Although Bacon proclaims the universal applicability of
induction, he himself treats it almost exclusively as a means to natural knowledge and ignores its civil (or social)
application.

Two further general distinctions should be mentioned. The first is between the divine and the secular. Most
divine knowledge must come from revelation, and reason has nothing to do with it. There is such a thing as divine
philosophy (what was later called rational, or natural, theology), but its sole task and competence is to prove that
there is a God. The second, more pervasive distinction is between theoretical and practical disciplines, that is,
between sciences proper and technologies, or “arts.”

Bacon acknowledges something he calls first philosophy, which is secular but not confined to nature or to
society. It is concerned with the principles, such as they are, that are common to all the sciences. Natural philosophy
divides into natural science as theory on the one hand and the practical discipline of applying natural science’s
findings to “the relief of man’s estate” on the other, which he misleadingly describes as natural magic. The former is
“the inquisition of causes,” the latter, “the production of effects.”

To subdivide still further, natural science is made up of physics and metaphysics, as Bacon understands it.
Physics, in his interpretation, is the science of observable correlations; metaphysics is the more theoretical science of
the underlying structural factors that explains observable regularities. Each has its practical, or technological,
partner; that of physics is mechanics, that of metaphysics, natural magic. It is to the latter that one must look for the
real transformation of the human condition through scientific progress. Mechanics is just levers and pulleys.

Mathematics is seen by Bacon as an auxiliary to natural science. Many subsequent philosophers of science
would agree, understanding it to be a logical means of expressing the content of scientific propositions or of
extracting part of that content. But Bacon is not clear about how mathematics was to be of service to science and
does not realize that the Galilean physics developing in his own lifetime was entirely mathematical in form. Although
one of his three inductive tables is concerned with correlated variations in degree (while the others concern
likenesses and differences in kind), he really has no conception of the role, already established in science, of exact
numerical measurement.

Bacon is fairly cursory about “human philosophy.” Four somewhat quaint sciences of body are sketched—
medicine, cosmetic, athletic, and “the voluptuary arts.” The sciences of mind—logic and ethics—are practical,
consisting of sets of rules for the correct management of reasoning or conduct, with no suggested theoretical
counterpart. Bacon is unreflectively conventional about moral truth, content to rely on the deliverances of the long
historical sequence of moralists, undisturbed by their disagreements with one another.

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 Bacon represents civil philosophy in the same uninquiringly practical way. It comprises not only the art of
government but also “conversation,” or the art of persuasion, and “negotiation,” or prudence, the topic of proverbs
and, to a considerable extent, of his own Essayes.

In principle, Bacon is committed to the view that human beings and society are as well fitted for inductive,
and, in 20th-century terms, scientific study as the natural world. Yet he depicts human and social studies as the field
of nothing more refined than common sense. It was, of course, an achievement to extricate them from religion, and
to do so without unnecessary provocation. But in his conception they remain practical arts with no sustaining body
of scientific theory to ratify them. It was left to Thomas Hobbes, for a time Bacon’s amanuensis, to develop complete
systems of human and social science. Bacon’s practice, however, was better than his program. In his writings on
history and law he went beyond the commonplaces of chronicle and precedent and engaged in explanation and
theory.5

3.3. John Ray

Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that
such had been the practice of his family before him". He published important works on botany, zoology, and natural
theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray
rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or
type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation.
He was the first to give a biological definition of the term species.6

Ray’s scientific apprenticeship occurred during the early phase of enthusiasm for experimental philosophy,
which was reflected in an outburst of scientific activity at both Oxford and Cambridge. At Cambridge overriding
influence was exerted by the Platonists, who provided the most important formative influence on Ray’s natural
philosophy. He absorbed their deep religious motivation for the study of nature as a means to reveal the workings of
God in His creation. Among the young Cambridge scholars Ray found many collaborators, including the anatomist
Walter Needham. Their initial activities embraced the whole range of experimental natural philosophy, but
comparative anatomy and botany emerged as Ray’s central preoccupations.7

John Ray was selected as a Fellow of Trinity College in 1649. However, he lost the position thirteen years
later when, in 1662 and with strong Puritan views, he declined to take the oath to the Act of Uniformity after the
Restoration. With full support of his former student and fellow naturalist, Francis Willoughby, Ray made several trips
throughout Europe with him, carrying out research in the fields of botany and zoology.

Ray formulated the fundamental principles of plant classification into cryptogams, monocotyledons and
dicotyledons in his landmark works “Catalogus plantarum Angliae” (Catalog of English Plants) in 1670 and “Methodus
plantarum nova” (A method for New Plants) in 1682.

He thus divided plants into three groups:

 Cryptogams, plants that reproduce by spores, without flowers or seeds

Other major publications of Ray include his three large volumes of “Historia generalis plantarum” (General
history of plants) published between 1686 and 1704 and “The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the
Creation” published in 1691. Both works were influential during their time.

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 The zoological contributions of Ray include the development of the most natural pre-Linnaean classification
of the animal kingdom. He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1667. Ray endorsed scientific empiricism
as compared to the deductive rationalism of the scholastics.His final work, an investigation of insects, was published
posthumously as “Historia Insectorum”.8

Conclusion

Science as we imagine it today, with laboratories, experiments and a professional culture, is a recent
phenomenon that did not appear until the nineteenth century. But its origins can be found much earlier and we
usually look for them in the period known as the ‘scientific revolution’. It is commonly believed that the recovery of
Greek philosophy during the Renaissance gave Western civilization the inspiration it needed to launch this
revolutionary way of looking at the world.

Faith communities urgently need to stop seeing science as alien, or a threat, but rather recognise their own
part in its story. The influence people of faith have on society through their relationships can then be hugely
supportive of science.

References

https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/birth-modern-science/
https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/modern-science-the-process-and-methodology/
https://www.crossway.org/articles/how-christianity-gave-rise-to-modern-science/
https://www.iop.org/physics-community/obituaries/john-houghton
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Bacon-Viscount-Saint-Alban/Thought-and-writings
https://makingscience.royalsociety.org/s/rs/people/fst00018098
https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/biology-biographies/john-ray
https://www.famousscientists.org/john-ray/

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