To speak of Christ, the Savior, also as a Savior of Science, may sound a jarring note in this world ever more saturated with science. To be sure, the claim that science alone can save mankind is less voluble today than a generation, let alone a century ago. A sobering reappraisal of science has been going on in the measure in which public opinion has been awakening to the ecological crisis and the irrationality of the arms race. It is increasingly conceded that moral strength to cope with these and many lesser though still great problems cannot come from science, which was and still is instrumental in creating them.

Insofar as science is not a mere tool but intellectual creativity it is intertwined with presuppositions that have distinctly ideological character. Here too more is conceded nowadays than a generation or two ago when science and positivism (be it in the guise of pragmatism, empiricism, or operationism) were fairly synonymous. That science is not irreconcilable with the ideology par excellence, or Christianity, can be heard in circles where not too long ago a perennial warfare between the two was the standard perspective. That science did not suddenly start with Galileo’s inclined plane is a point that can be found in more recent better-grade college texts on early modern intellectual history. The reason for this is that even some prominent scientists have taken note of extensive historical findings about some medieval predecessors of Galileo.

To say medieval is almost to say Christian and in a rather dogmatic sense. The medievals certainly took it for a dogmatic verity that the universe was created freely and rationally throughout, the only kind of universe that lends itself to scientific investigation. They certainly did not endorse the idea of a necessarily existing universe which invites an a priori approach to nature and nips empirical research in the bud. But what is distinctly Christian in the idea of a contingent universe? Did not Whitehead tie the Scholastics’ insistence on nature’s rationality, as a factor crucial for the future of science, to their belief in the absolute Lordship of Jehovah? The Scholastics would have been the last to claim that Jehovah, or Yahweh (He Who Is), was a divine name first invoked by Christians, although they were the first to sense the inexhaustible philosophical significance of that name so unique in the history of religions.

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Selection from The Savior of Science, 1-2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000) | Stanley Jaki