<\/p>\n
It is no surprise for those who know me, that I am a lover of all things relating to science. It started with the third-grade science teacher who defended me from students teasing me about the giant baby shoes I wore to correct my pronation. Since that time, I loved him and the class he taught, science. Perhaps it was also because he told me I was smarter than my detractors or perhaps it was because I was always an inquisitive child. None the less, the love has stuck with me my whole life.<\/p>\n
In The Evolution of the West: How Christianity has Shaped Our Values<\/em>, Nick Spencer presents a collection of essays and reviews delivered at Theos, a Christian think tank in the UK, that explain how Christianity has actually influenced and shaped the values of the Western world. Alas, Christianity is not the enemy after all but shaped our minds in many wonderful ways. I was drawn to the essay in chapter 7, The Accidental Midwife: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. In this chapter, Spencer says, \u201cHistorians have long asked why the Scientific Revolution happened, and why it happened when it did.\u201d[1]<\/a> Spencer points out the there were scientific revolutions throughout history as well as great advances in China by the fourteenth century, but without capitalizing on this and transforming it into a full-scale \u201cScientific Revolution\u201d as the Europeans did later in the sixteenth-seventeenth-century.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n Spencer lists a few dramatic changes that happened at the same time which caused Christianity to serve as a mid-wife to science. First, he lists the \u201cdiscovery of the New World\u201d; with this discovery, it showed the ancients did not know everything since \u201cnew flora and fauna\u201d were discovered that did not fit the classifications previously known.[3]<\/a> Another factor Spencer lists are the change in the way Scripture was read; Scripture was read less symbolically, reading it more \u201chorizontally\u201d than \u201cvertically\u201d.[4]<\/a> Also, Spencer points to a transformation of the understanding of vocation in the Reformation period, which allowed natural philosophers to show how they might bring glory to God in his works.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n This change of the understanding of vocation in the Reformation period also points to the secularization of the Western world. James K. A. Smith in How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor<\/em>, explains how Taylor believes the Reform was the fulcrum of Modernity and that it describes \u201cthat difficult space of unstable equilibrium between the demands of eternal and creaturely life. In particular, Taylor highlights \u201ca profound dissatisfaction with the hierarchical equilibrium between lay life and the renunciative vocations\u201d.\u201d[6]<\/a> Spencer believes it is this separation that allows Christianity to help birth science.<\/p>\n Although this looking outside of God to understand the natural world may have been instigated by the Reformation and how we changed the reading of the Bible, it is interesting that many during that same time period of the Reformation actually found the Bible instructive to the formation of scientific theory. Galileo supported his view of the cosmos both \u201cwith arguments both theological and scientific\u201d.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n In reality, as Christians, we now know that God created the world and all of its wonder, including science. The truth is Christianity can birth science but only as it is unencumbered by erroneous beliefs about God.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a>. Spencer, Nick. The Evolution of the West: How Christianity has Shaped Our Values<\/em>. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. 2016: Kindle ed. Chap. 7, sec. 1.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a>. \u00a0Ibid., Chap. 7, sec. 1.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a>. Ibid., Chap. 7, sec. 4.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a>. Ibid.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a>. Ibid.<\/p>\n